And here's a reminder of how, with the economic downturn and the tide turning against the values of starchitecture, changing tack isn't always easy - from last week's NY Times interview with Gergiev about the Mariinsky2:
Gergiev’s loyal relationships with wealthy friends and government officials keep the Mariinsky afloat. For the past eight years, he has been pushing to build a Mariinsky II opera house, budgeted at about $500 million, to complement the jewel-box auditorium within the pale green, 19th-century Mariinsky Theater. By meeting with Putin and two cabinet ministers, he received approval for the expansion. Afterward, an informal competition in 2001 and a high-profile juried competition in 2003 each selected a cutting-edge foreign architect: first, an American, Eric Owen Moss, and then a Frenchman, Dominique Perrault. Both Moss’s iceberg of glass and blue granite and Perrault’s glass-and-gold snowflake geometry provoked outraged squawks in conservative St. Petersburg. Both died on the drawing board. Gergiev then resolved to select the architect himself and found one: Jack Diamond, designer of the Toronto opera house, a Modernist glass box that Gergiev says is superbly functional. “Jack Diamond is a practical man,” he told me. He sensed the climate wasn’t right for a project like Moss’s or Perrault’s. “Although it looks very good on paper, at a time when people are worried about their jobs and children, you don’t go for extravaganza,” he said. But he needs top-level authorization to dispense with competitions and start over right away with a new architect.
We were speaking in a hotel cafe in Moscow early last month when an assistant came up and handed him a cellphone. It was Elvira Nabiullina, the minister of economic development and trade, calling to say that she had talked to President Medvedev on his behalf. Gergiev thanked her.
“People are worried,” he told me afterward. “Let’s be honest, it’s a little bit smaller people in the picture, but I know the Canadian will do the job, and I take responsibility. Some people don’t want to be blamed. If anything goes wrong, everyone wants to be sure that I will be the one guilty.”
