“What Mahler wrote is so clear that it is nearly impossible to move away from it.”
Maestro, do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?
Gergiev: I remember it very vaguely. It was the 1st Symphony. Obviously, I was a very, very young man, but I remember this final movement when the horn section suddenly stands up and continues to play while standing. It’s a very powerful statement of lust in this symphony. That was very memorable. I don’t think that it is now my favorite memory of all the symphonies that Mahler composed, but it was my first one. That was a long time ago and of course it was also a long time before I started to look at Mahler’s symphonies – although when I was preparing to participate in the Herbert von Karajan Competition for young conductors, I saw that Mahler’s 1st Symphony was proposed for young conductors to prepare. This means that if you prepare it, you could be asked to conduct the second movement, part of the finale, part of the first movement or just a couple of tempo transitions at the end – they don’t give you the entire symphony to conduct. So you have to know it and I knowingly started to study the symphony and played it for myself, if not to get to the heart of it, then to be able to conduct it, should I be given the chance to conduct it in the second round of the competition. This symphony was not for the first round, the beginning of the competition was very classical. I remember conducting maybe Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony – the repertoire was very classical. Somehow I got into the second round and then into the third and then I got to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic which was a dream come true for a young man like me.
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