Valery GERGIEV is a Russian conductor and a leading representative of the St. Petersburg conducting school. He studied at the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory under the legendary pedagogue Ilya Musin, during which he won prizes at the Berlin Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition and the All-Soviet Union Conducting Competition. He was subsequently invited to join the Kirov Theatre (now the Mariinsky Theatre) as Assistant Principal Conductor, making his conducting debut in 1978 with Prokofiev's opera War and Peace. In 1988, he was appointed Music Director of the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 1996 became its General Director and Artistic Director, overseeing the orchestra, opera, and ballet companies. Since December 2023, he has also served as General Director of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and Music Co-Chair of the Federal Union of Theatres of the Russian Federation. Under his leadership, the Mariinsky Orchestra has reached unprecedented artistic heights, expanding its repertoire not only in opera and ballet scores but also encompassing the complete symphonic cycles of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and many other cornerstones of the orchestral canon.