Watching, and learning from, the great Soviet masters of the 1970s helped give a special musical charge to the work of Valery Gergiev, who conducts in Dublin tomorrow

IT'S NOT often put this way, but there are those who lament the carbon footprint of the successful 21st-century conductor. The cliche is that in the old days conductors used to spend their time with their own orchestras, and now they fritter it away clocking up air miles as they maintain their profile in the major musical centres of the world.

Some, of course, contrive to have it both ways, to be everywhere at once, to do a full stint at home and keep up the peripatetic life-style. That's certainly what Valery Gergiev does. He is both artistic and general director of St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre (still remembered and branded in the West as the Kirov Opera of the Soviet era), principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and artistic director of a string of international festivals.

Yet no one can reasonably accuse Gergiev of spreading himself too thin.

Everything he touches seems to turn to gold. There's a special charge in his music-making that takes players and listeners alike into what can feel like uncharted and slightly dangerous territory. His music-making is both highly cultured and slightly wild. It is sophisticated yet raw, thoughtful yet elemental.

He was born in Moscow, but spent most of his childhood in Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia, where his parents came from. He went to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to train as a conductor. When I met him in London I asked him first about two musical giants of the Leningrad he moved to in 1972, the legendary conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Evgeny Mravinsky, and his conducting teacher at the conservatory there, the much less well-known Ilya Musin.

"I studied with both, to be precise," Gergiev says. "What I couldn't find in class, I could find in the Philharmonic Hall. I was listening to one of the greatest combinations ever made. When I say 'listen to combinations', it sounds wrong, but I'll explain what I mean. The combination of conductor and orchestra was unique. The combination of conductor, orchestra and hall was equally unique. The combination of all three with the public was completely unique. No one would ever cough during Mravinsky's concerts. People would kill themselves rather than cough, so hugely admired was this conductor and this orchestra in this golden era.

"It was in the Soviet Union. Everyone thinks the Soviet Union was a wrong country, and everything that was happening there was no good. God, it's a mistake. These were probably the best concerts offered to anyone then, though I know how great Herbert von Karajan and Lenny Bernstein were. Both men I met and knew, especially Lenny, who actually was very willing to share with young colleagues. One day in a restaurant in St Petersburg, we spent nearly five hours talking about music. These great conductors had a huge impact on my own life.

"Mravinsky, thanks for asking, was so totally serious about music, and so totally devoted to composers, you couldn't find a better teacher. It's not possible. Musin was a great, great teacher for people who wanted to understand what conducting the orchestra means professionally. The great quality of Musin was that he never taught people how to hate music. That was very important. Some teachers you know, especially those who use a stick, so to say, all these famous beatings and hittings, if you do something wrong, then some aggressive teachers think that they have to scream, then kids simply start to hate music.

"It can even happen to a grown boy. I was 19 when I came for the first time to work with Musin. But we had admiration for our professor, and he had admiration for music. So we learned how these can be combined, how someone teaches you theory and some very pragmatic things, how you move your hands, how you work with your body, how you articulate, what is the language of conducting - this he knew very well. But the purely orchestral world, very few people ever knew as well as Mravinsky."

Gergiev describes his early career as "accidental". "I went to Armenia once," he says. "And they asked me on my first day with the orchestra to become chief conductor. It was crazy. I was 27 years old. Some people felt I had potential, some people felt I could immediately build relationships. But, most importantly, everyone felt that the orchestra sounded out of the ordinary.

"The one reason for that was Prokofiev. I simply wanted to conduct the Second Symphony of Prokofiev for the first time. I'd never conducted this symphony, I knew it well, but I was just waiting for the opportunity. It's a tough symphony." He's not joking - the composer used the words "iron and steel".

"The orchestra didn't know it at all," Gergiev adds. "I really had to work, really. But you know, when you work you expect results. No one wants to work and see that it was totally a waste of time. The results were there, I was happy, and obviously there were some other people who were happy, and they offered me this position, and I agreed."

HIS APPOINTMENT AS artistic director of the Kirov was, from his perspective, another accident. When Mravinsky died in 1988, Yuri Temirkanov (another Musin pupil), moved from the Kirov to the Leningrad Philharmonic, and the singers and musicians of the Kirov voted for Gergiev as his replacement.

"I didn't expect any of this to happen," he says. "I didn't know I would become artistic director of the Kirov, which was, for me, not the end of the world. But it's a huge institution. Now it's all-important, because I invested so much time in it, all my energy, all my concentration, also all my physical resources. We went together through very difficult times. The end of the 1980s and all of the 1990s were not easy; very enjoyable but not easy. Sometimes I left the office at three or four o'clock in the morning because, after artistic work, there was so much to organise in the life of this institution. I had sometimes to devote astronomical amounts of concentration and physical energy. Which is fine. I don't regret it at all."

He clearly takes immense pride in the way the company has developed, not just the worldwide interest when the company tours, but also the fact that "we do the Ring cycle with our own voices, we don't import. Of course, Bryn Terfel is a great friend of mine and Placido Domingo came many times to sing Parsifal and Walküre and so on. But it doesn't mean we don't do our own Parsifal with our own singers. And they're not bad at all."

The break-up of the Soviet Union was both a disaster and a blessing in disguise, he says. "It was incredible how Gorbachev freed the country. Then incredible suffering followed. The amount of families destroyed, the most incredibly enlightened people - teachers, doctors, scientists, artists - either had to leave the country or live in poverty, sometimes with really very, very bad financial conditions, in terrible flats. It's such a big change in few years, three to five years for a country the size of the Soviet Union. Hopefully it never happens again, at least to these regions where people already went through this suffering.

"But now there are so many rich people in Russia, the economy is growing, there is a stability which is not understood by everyone as a blessing. In the West they think it's boring to see Russia being so stable. We think it's great."

He recalls that, back in the early 1990s, people who are now great stars (he names Anna Netrebko, Olga Borodina, Vladimir Galuzin) performed "for maybe $20 per performance".

Gergiev is one of those conductors who brings a special sonority to his performances.

"When I'm in front of the orchestra, I'm listening, listening, listening, all the time," he says. "And then if I open my mouth and I talk, most probably it will be about sound. In the great orchestras, like the London Symphony Orchestra, or Chicago or Mariinsky, you don't speak much about what is the right rhythm. Everyone is educated enough. You don't tell them a duplet is 'one two, one two'. It is not what you worry about. It's how this duplet is played, why, emotionally, it should be played this other way, its relationship to another rhythm, or another function, because the rhythmic function comes together with harmony, or the bass-line function or the melody.

"You have to see 20 things, and out of 20 things you see, you choose one which is more important, then maybe you stop a great orchestra and ask them, 'why don't you maybe pay attention to this detail?'. When you have a relationship as principal conductor, you have a responsibility. You have to do things that reconfirm that you are a right person to stand in front of this particular orchestra, and you take care of certain things which make the orchestra even better than it already is. No one measures. There is no instrument to measure. But at some point, you see the orchestra sounds deeper than it sounded before, or it sounds more tender, more sensual, then the colours are either more aggressive or more transparent."

He wants his conducting to be a spontaneous art. If you explain too much at rehearsal, he says, "then you are a prisoner of your words".

Differences between performances are often a matter of the hall's acoustics, particularly how they seem to dictate the pacing of a long work. Again and again - probably because of my opening question - he comes back to Mravinsky. "You think you know everything about the Second Symphony of Brahms. Well, he played this symphony and you felt, wow,was it written this way? Then you go home, you open the score, and you find it immediately: everything the composer wants, this conductor seemed to a) understand and b) be able to bring with him to the podium. He never forgot to bring this knowledge to the concert.

"The orchestra was like an instrument in his hands. And he didn't move his hands much physically. But his eyes, his face! Expression was all-important. If he looked at the brass, and it was just half a second, one look, these people would understand if they had to add a little bit more, if they had to refrain from crushing everything around."

HE NEVER GOT to test his own powers on the orchestra he idolised while Mravinsky was alive. And this was a cause of emotional suffering for him.

"After conducting 10 good orchestras around the world, you still wait for your chance to conduct the orchestra you respect most, simply because it played such a role in your life," he says. "No one played Bruckner like this orchestra under Mravinsky. No one, not even the great, great Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan.

"The shock came not only from power. It's a combination of unbelievable power and frightening clarity. These never come together. The only conductor I heard who could do both was Mravinsky. Maybe it's the acoustic as well, and the fact that the orchestra worked with him for 50 years. This combination was just frightening. It's a killer. You just can't move after the concert. You hear a huge orchestra which sounds as clear as the best quartet in the world. At the same time, it's the most powerful orchestra, period."

It's a fair compliment to Gergiev, that he comes as close as anyone else today in meeting his own description of Mravinsky's conducting.

Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony and Stravinsky's Petrushka at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, tomorrow