Dance

The artistic director of the Mariinsky is the renowned conductor Valery Gergiev. One of today’s musical megastars, he is well known to favour opera over ballet. But he’s also savvy enough to recognise that it is the ballet company – with its incessant international touring schedule – that is his theatre’s true Golden Calf. It is so large, with around 250 as opposed to the Royal Ballet’s 88 dancers, that it can simultaneously tour while continuing to perform at home. Last autumn, when the Hochhausers began planning the Covent Garden season, Gergiev seemed to be going along with proposed repertory suggestions. ‘I met with him in Helsinki, in Paris and St Petersburg. Discussions, discussions, discussions. I thought we had managed to put together a fine and varied season,’ says Hochhauser. But then, much to her surprise, Gergiev dug in his heels over Shostakovich – and nothing but Shostakovich. Feature continues

‘I was presented with this menu and it gave me indigestion,’ she says. Yet, at the beginning of the year, in an attempt to affect a compromise, the Hochhausers offered him a deal: they would do his proposed Shostakovich opera season for two weeks if he would then let them present the ballet for a further four weeks.

Surprisingly, maybe suicidally, Gergiev refused. ‘I looked at what he was proposing and realised that it was going to cost a £1 million to present, so I had to refuse. I’m not a government, I can’t afford that. Where on earth was the money going to come from?

‘We’ve worked closely together for six years and, without being too immodest, I know that he thinks highly of me and, naturally, I’ve great respect for him, his artistry, but I can’t do the impossible. Finally, when he said it had to be Shostakovich or nothing, I had to say, “Well, sadly, it has to be nothing.” At which stage I immediately got on the phone to the Bolshoi.

‘This was already late January,’ she says. ‘I flew off to Moscow. If we were going to make this happen I needed to do six months’ worth of work in about three weeks. The Bolshoi was very co-operative.’ And, though she doesn’t say so, she is undoubtedly chuffed to be replacing their St Petersburg rivals at Covent Garden.

‘I don’t like the idea of confrontation between the two theatres,’ says Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi’s artistic director, when we tracked him down in Moscow. ‘We are two very important theatres that represent two sides of the moon of Russian ballet and I think it’s good for London to be able to see both.

‘We had planned to come to London next summer, but when Lilian Hochhauser proposed this summer we saw it as a great opportunity, so we changed our schedule completely and changed the dancers’ vacations. Covent Garden is one of the most important stages in the world so we rearranged everything for the chance to appear there with repertory that presents a more modern face of the Bolshoi.’

The Hochhausers’ track record is legendary. They brought the Bolshoi to the West for the very first time back in 1956. Today it is impossible to imagine the impact of that first pre-perestroika season. The Hochhausers decided they’d do the same with the Kirov during the summer of 1961. The box office advance was sensational, ‘But,’ Hochhauser remembers, ‘when we met them at the airport it was all glum, there were faces down to the floor.’ The reason quickly became obvious. A couple of hours earlier, as the company was boarding the plane for a flight from Paris to London, a rising young star named Rudolf Nureyev had defected by dramatically flinging himself into the arms of the French gendarmes. Nevertheless – or perhaps because of the front-page headlines – the season was a huge success and the relationship has gone on from there.

Getting back to this summer, ‘It looks as if this is an argument,’ Hochhauser says, ‘but it isn’t. Will we work together again? I don’t know. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t. Gergiev is one of the great musicians of our time – I wouldn’t say he’s easy,’ she interrupts herself, ‘but he wouldn’t be alone in that. I simply had to do what I had to do. So did he.’