Outside it’s snowing in the pale and spectral city of St Petersburg. Inside it’s 4.30 am and we’ve been drinking for several hours in a restaurant next to the Mariinsky Theatre when Valery Gergiev, for many the world’s greatest conductor and with a reputation as a wild man, suggests now would be the best time for an interview with him.(If you are Gergiev you don’t get thrown out of restaurants there – he even gets his own motorcade if he needs to get about the city in a hurry).As a website called Opera Chic put it, “he can make the Pastorale sound like John Williams and Richard Strauss sound Read more ...

It is a curious feeling to go to meet a hated figure and find a delicate, blonde girl with a sweet face.On Monday, 23-year-old ballerina Alina Somova opens the batting for the legendary Mariinsky Ballet’s Covent Garden tour in Romeo and Juliet, needing to defy her critics who line up from West to East accusing her of vulgarising the majestic, poised St Petersburg style that defines classical ballet worldwide.Even for a ballerina, in an art where physical evolution seems to move twice as fast as anywhere else, Somova is peculiarly flexible. She throws her leg high over the vertical, even in a Read more ...

If you tell a tall, whisper-slim young woman of 31 that she has been described as "the soul of Russia", it is understandable that she looks startled. Two huge, smoke-grey eyes cast a doubtful glance at me, and she murmurs in Russian. Her translator announces: "That is a very serious declaration."So it is. And yet Uliana Lopatkina, despite her tender age, is now lionised almost universally as the greatest ballerina today in Russia, a country where they know about such things. Effortlessly, it seems, in the 10 years since a 5ft 9in beanpole with a square jaw and an apparently boneless body Read more ...