Edinburgh festival: Valery Gergiev – a Tsar on the side of the masses

By Ismene Brown [Daily Telegraph, 14 August 2008]
When Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills set this year’s festival theme – that of shifting borders – he could not have imagined that a shifting border in the Caucasus mountains would become a bloody arena of 21st-century war as the festival opened, nor that two of his best attractions would be natives of that area.