The New York Times | Valery Gergiev: ‘Anyone Can Buy a Ticket’

I read that Mikheil Saakashvili, the self-exiled former president of Georgia, was living in Williamsburg. He may come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music during your residency this month.Sergei Prokofiev, the great composer, had a wonderful saying. When he was told that someone didn’t like his ballet, he smiled and said, “Anyone can buy a ticket.” So anyone who comes to the performances at BAM is welcome.

Most people in New York, when they think of Russian musicians who have played Brooklyn, probably think of Pussy Riot. Oh, God.

You’re close with Vladimir Putin. I can’t imagine you’re a big fan of theirs. I don’t know much about them, to be honest. I didn’t understand why they had a concert in the Christ the Savior Cathedral. I am not such a fanatical religious guy, but I do think it is wrong to do this in this church, which was rebuilt after it was detonated during the Stalin years. It’s a little dirty.

As the artistic and general director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, you are among the most prominent ambassadors of Russian culture. How do you navigate between Russia and the West when things are so tense? If I know I have to perform in Carnegie Hall, then the navigation system is totally silent in me. I just have to know what the music is. I think Russians don’t understand much about Obama. And maybe in the U.S., people understand even less about Putin. Maybe American society was never challenged with events like 1917 or the Second World War. The Great Depression was maybe the most difficult thing you went through in a hundred years.

Some of your Western fans object to your support of Putin’s anti-gay-propaganda law, which many see as a much broader crackdown on gay rights. At your 2013 Carnegie Hall concert, protesters yelled, “Gergiev, your silence is killing Russian gays!”First of all, I am not part of any killing anywhere in the world. Second, was there any killing of gays? Nobody can tell me one story, including my Western friends.

Before this legislation, did you have a reputation for being anti-gay? Of course not. My task is to help gifted people. It does not matter if they are black or white, gay or not gay. The important thing is that you cannot put a totally uninteresting artistic creation in front of the public.

Things in Russia look very bleak from our perspective. Across the West, the headlines are the falling ruble, collapsing oil prices, the silencing of dissent. I think headlines are only part of the news from Russia. My news is that the theaters and concert halls are full, and full of young people. That gives me more than hope.

Do you think President Obama is naïve to think that sanctions could push Russia to leave Crimea? There was so much Russian blood spilled in Crimea over the last 200 years, so much. I think Russians know the history of Crimea and the history of czarist Russia and the history of the Soviet Union. It is not up to me to give a lecture, but Crimea is a very complex issue, which cannot be described in one word, “annexation.”

I saw a report that you had been invited to give a concert in Donetsk, the separatist-held city in eastern Ukraine. I don’t even know who invited me. I read it in the paper. But Sergei Prokofiev was born near Donetsk. Above all, I am interested in doing something for the people who gave us Prokofiev. But I have no plans to go to Donetsk or to Crimea.

Do you feel like one of the last bridges standing between Russia and the West? No. I don’t see much anti-American feeling here. People continue to watch American movies, every second person has an iPhone in their hands. I think it will be very difficult to make Russian society totally anti-American. I also see a lot of people in Europe who are saying there is something strange about these sanctions — it didn’t work with Cuba for how many years?

At least 50. Maybe it is an illusion that it will work in the case of Russia.

Interview by ANDREW MEIER 

A version of this article appears in print on January 18, 2015, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Anyone Can Buy a Ticket’