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"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between." - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The art of Valery Gergiev is in great demand throughout the world. The maestro is a vivid representative of the St Petersburg conducting school and a former pupil of the legendary Professor Ilya Musin. His debut as a conductor at the Kirov Theatre (now the Mariinsky) 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). 

The Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev has scaled new heights, assimilating not just opera and ballet scores, but also an expansive symphony music repertoire – every symphony by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Prokofiev and Shostakovich and works by Berlioz, Bruckner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Ustvolskaya, Shchedrin, Kancheli and other composers. 

Valery Gergiev's international activities are no less intensive and active. Having made debuts in 1992 at the Bayerishe Staatsoper (Musorgsky's Boris Godunov), in 1993 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin) and in 1994 at the Metropolitan Opera (Verdi's Otello with Plácido Domingo in the title role), the maestro successfully continues to collaborate with the world's great opera houses. He works with the World Orchestra for Peace (which he has directed since 1997 following the death of the ensemble's founder Sir Georg Solti), the Philharmonic Orchestras of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, New York and Los Angeles, the Symphony Orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and San Francisco, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and many other ensembles. From 1995 to 2008 Valery Gergiev was Principal Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (of which he remains an honorary conductor to this day), and from 2007 to 2015 he was Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Since autumn 2015 the maestro has headed the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Valery Gergiev is the founder and director of prestigious international festivals including the Stars of the White Nights (since 1993), the Moscow Easter Festival (since 2002), the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam, the Mikkeli Festival and the 360 Degreesfestival in Munich. Since 2011 he has directed the organisational committee of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Valery Gergiev focuses much of his attention on working with young musicians. One of his initiatives saw the revival of the All-Russian Choral Society; this includes the Children's Chorus of Russia, which has appeared at the Mariinsky-II, the Bolshoi Theatre and at the closing ceremony of the XXII Winter Olympics in Sochi. Since 2013 the maestro has directed the National Youth Orchestra of the USA and regularly appears with the youth orchestras of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Verbier Festival and the Pacific Ocean Music Festival in Sapporo. Since 2015 the Mariinsky Theatre has run the Mariinsky NEXT annual festival, which features children's and youth orchestras of St Petersburg.