- The Observer, Sunday 23 April 2006
Dmitri Liss, the conductor of the Urals Philharmonic Orchestra, based in Ekaterinburg, is telling me that some of his more appreciative audiences have attended concerts at places like Sverdlovsk-434 and Novouralsk. Places, he tells me, you won't find on the map. Secret cities where they make nuclear weapons. He tried to get sponsorship for the Orchestra from the nuke guys but they weren't having it.
Ekaterinburg is the biggest industrial centre in Russia and sits near the border of Europe and Asia. There's a sign near the city where you can have your photograph taken. But that's for tourists - the real border is 20 miles further away. We check out both places. Then there's the site at Ganina Yama where the bodies of the Tsar's family were thrown down a mineshaft.
Dmitri has been the leader of the Orchestra for 10 years now and has built up an almost psychic rapport with them - particularly Boris Berezovsky, a pianist with fearsome technique. His album for Warner Classics this month with Dmitri's orchestra consists of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, which he manages to brilliantly reinvent. Later in the year he's releasing some more modern Hindemith material. A laid-back virtuoso who picks up international prizes the way others pick up parking fines, he doesn't seem to need sheet music, relying on what he calls 'fingertip memory'.
His one flaw seems to be a love of gambling, and he insists we go to the casino. I tell him I have enough vices without gambling, but he gives me a few hundred roubles which I immediately lose. I leave Boris in the casino while I disappear into the freezing night, ending up at an Irish bar, where a local blues band does a decent version of 'Sweet Home Chicago'.
