Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 26/10
YOU CANNOT START WITHOUT ME – VALERY GERGIEV, MAESTRO
Thirteen/ White Nights Foundation of America/ WNET.ORG
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Allan Miller
Written By: Allan Miller
Cast: Valery Gergiev, Yefim Bronfman, Renee Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Leonidas Kavakos, Uliana Lopatkina, Anna Netrebko
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/26/09
Opens: November 2, 2009
The only way you’ll get a young audience other than the small Juilliard crowd to attend “You Cannot Start Without Me—Valery Gergiev, Maestro”—is if the 20-somethings think that “Maestro” is the name of a heavy metal group. Here in the U.S., classical music has been heading for the toilet, losing ground yearly, steamrollered by rock groups, punk groups, easy-listening stations, even the insipid ballads popularized by the 1950s TV series “Your Hit Parade.” Tower Records did not go out of business because it could not sell its classical CDs as that department represented only one percent of its inventory. Indeed only about one percent of Americans dig the classics—about the same as the percentage that go to movies with subtitles.
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For those who love music, even for those who merely like the most abstract of all the arts, Allan Miller’s movie is a gem, an exhilarating, electrifying look at one of the world’s great orchestral conductors; the charismatic fellow named Valery Gergiev, who has made the rounds with orchestras outside of Russia, including New York but particularly London. He is a charismatic man, as one needs to be magnetic to hold the attention of the typical one-hundred-plus educated virtuosos that make up the Western world’s symphony orchestras, musicians who may play straight symphonic and chamber music but also sit in the orchestral pit for ballet and opera. Gergiev could not have hoped for a better director than Allan Miller, who has garnered awards for such films about music as “From Mao to Mozart, which focused on Isaac Stern’s visit to China; “Small Wonders,” about a violin program in East Harlem’s public schools (you’re not going to get lovers of symphonic music unless you start with kids); “Itzhak Perlman – Fiddling for the Future,” which he directed for PBS; “The Turandot Project,” which brought together Zubin Mehta and Zhang Yimou in Beijing. He filmed composer John Cage, whose experimental works have been used to increase suspense in thrillers.
Those who believe that a conductor can be replaced by a metronome have little idea what goes into the work of such a person, though one cannot be blamed for thinking that the guy waving his arms with or without a baton is simply keeping tempo. Miller watches Gergiev browbeat orchestras at rehearsals, coming down most strongly, it seems, on his own Kirov group at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. (There is no mention in the notes or the movie about ticketing for that lush hall, but, for example, for the November 4th production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” at 7 p.m., ticiekts go for $47 to $332—presumably the real lovers of the 19th Century Russian composer are in the nose-bleed seats while the people who go because it’s “good for them” or to be seen shell out the big rubles.)
We get a thankfully brief bio of Gergiev, who stunned the music world by winning a major conducting competition in Berlin at age 24 and appeared here in the Big Apple’s Carnegie Hall in 2003 with his Mariinsky Orchestra. We also meet his family; his beautiful wife and lovely kids, one of whom at the age of about six defies his dad by wanting to be “the captain of a big ship” when he grows up.
Enough about bio. What’s super about this film is that the music does not come out in sound bites but in renditions that last up to five minutes each. Wow! What sounds! The Russian composer appears to favor Stravinsky, since we hear him lead “The Rite of Spring” in various segments, a composition that led to catcalls and boos when first performed in Paris at the turn of the 20th century from an audience accustomed to demure classical ballet and not to rhythmic scenes of Russian pagan life. Yet the piece seems so not-avant-garde today. In the rehearsals—and that is where we see the real work of the conductor—Gergiev is to music as Antonin Scalia is to the U.S. Supreme Court—a strict constructionist. If Stravinsky did not write “staccato” when he composed the then experimental piece, then Gergiev will have no messing around today. One wonders whether most audience members would know the difference between some measures of staccato and some notes at a microscopically slower pace, but Gergiev knows, and that’s all that matters.
The Russian composer is nationalistic enough, favoring Prokofiev (we hear part of his Scythian Suite); Rachmaninoff (“Symphony in D”); Shostakovich (“Fourth Symphony”); Tchaikovsky (The ‘dying swan’ scene from “Swan Lake”); but no Borodin or Moussorgsky. Nor is he afraid of Wagner, who last time I heard is informally banned in Israel given the German musician’s anti-Semitic writings, presenting a scene from “Twilight of the Gods” and a concert version of “Siegfried.” Blink and you’ll miss Liszt and Brahms, but there are stunning scenes with subtitles from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and from Tchaikovsky’s “Yevgeny Onegin.” Anyone who goes to opera today without knowing the language sung should insist on the supertitles that New York opera houses now use, because trashy as some of the melodramatic plots are, we would do well to know what’s going on.
That’s not all the goodies! We are treated to some lush scenes that could have come out of travel brochures of St. Petersburg, featuring the home of the Kirov ballet’ of Moscow’s Krasnaya Ploshchad, the world’s most famous square with its unbelievably gorgeous St. Basil’s Cathedral’; of the Volga River; the mountains of the Caucasus (whence the conduct came); of New York, London and a village in Ossetia.
Do you recall how many times Signourney Weaver’s character, Max Conners, pretends she knows Russian but answers every question in David Mirkin’s movie “Heartbreakers” with “Da”? That’s how strongly this film is recommended. Michael Moore can still be depended on for delivering the most humorous documentary each year or so, as he did in 2009 with “Capitalism: A Love Story.” But so far in 2009, “You Cannot Start Without Me” is the most impressive.
YOU CANNOT START WITHOUT ME – VALERY GERGIEV, MAESTRO
Unrated. 86 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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