The Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra is one of the oldest in Russia. Its history dates back to the first orchestra of the St Petersburg Imperial Orchestra, covering a period of over two hundred years.

 

 

In the distant past, the orchestra of the Board of Imperial Theatres emerged and developed its activities under two conductors. The first of them was composer Caterino Cavos (from 1803 Principal Conductor of the Russian Opera Theatre and, from 1832, Director of the Imperial Theatres' Orchestras). As head of the ensemble, Cavos conducted not just premieres of his own numerous operas, but was musical director of productions of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar. Moreover, he was involved in the Russian premieres of operas by foreign composers - Cimarosa's Horatii and Curiatii (1815), Weber's Der Freischütz (1824), Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Rossini's Semiramide (1835) and Le Comte Ory (1838) among others.

 

 

Valery Gergiev is a vivid representative of the St Petersburg conducting school and a former pupil of the legendary Professor Ilya Musin. While still a student at the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory, Gergiev won the Herbert von Karajan Competition in Berlin and the All-Union Conducting Competition in Moscow, following which he was invited to join the Kirov Theatre (now the Mariinsky) as an assistant to the principal conductor. His debut as a conductor at the theatre came on 12 January 1978 with Sergei Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace. In 1988 Valery Gergiev was appointed Music Director of the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 1996 he became its Artistic and General Director (leading the orchestra and opera and ballet companies). Moreover, since December 2023 he has also been General Director of the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia and Co-Chairman for the musical division of the Theatre Union of the Russian Federation.

 

Through maestro Gergiev’s efforts the Mariinsky Theatre has revived operas by Richard Wagner. In 1997 came Parsifal, which had not been performed in Russia for more than eighty years, in 1999 Lohengrin was revived, and by 2003 the grandiose operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen had been staged in full. That was the first time following an interval of almost a century that the complete tetralogy was staged in Russia and the first production in Russia to be performed in the original German. The tetralogy has been performed on Mariinsky Theatre tours to great acclaim in Moscow as well as abroad – in the USA, South Korea, Japan, Great Britain, Spain and China. The theatre’s repertoire also includes productions of Tristan und Isolde (2005), Der fliegende Holländer (1998, 2008), Tannhäuser (2019, 2021) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2023). Mariinsky along with Bayreuth Festspielhaus is the only theatre in the world where all Wagner’s mature operas are performed every season.