“Recently Gergiev has exercised his enormous power at the Mariinsky to enthusiastically uncork an area that had seemed deadened by the loss of the vast Soviet theatre subsidies: new Russian opera. Shchedrin’s was commissioned by Lorin Maazel for New York, but back home Gergiev has ordered up no fewer than five new Russian operas for the Mariinsky – a feat of commissioning on a Tsarist scale.”