Nobody else was ever going to conduct this concert. Valery Gergiev, the most talked-about maestro in the world today, is not only Ossetian by birth (his wife and children still live there) but also a close friend of Vladimir Putin.

At 55 he is also by far the most influential wheeler-dealer in the arts world of post-communist Russia. From the Russian point of view he is the perfect choice: the living embodiment of the view that Ossetians are far closer to Russians in temperament, politics and culture than to Georgians.

Not that Gergiev is like anybody else. He has a Rasputin-like presence on the concert platform — dark, unsettling and mesmerising — and a tsar-like reputation for dragging the venerable but ailing Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg out of its post-perestroika doldrums.

Exercising ruthless control over every aspect of the theatre’s operation, and wooing oligarchs, politicians and foreign sponsors with equal success, he has turned the company into a powerhouse of dazzling young talent. He regularly works a 20-hour day, holding meetings through the night in a favourite St Petersburg watering hole, then appearing at 10am to rehearse some operatic epic.

His conducting schedule is equally manic. He once directed three different orchestras, in three different countries, on the same day. That he was conducting his “other” orchestra, the London Symphony, in a three-hour Prom in London on Wednesday would have been no deterrent to his appearing in South Ossetia 24 hours later. Inevitably a private jet is waiting to whisk him round the world, courtesy of his super-rich Russian friends.

All that has taken its toll. His face, usually with a couple of days’ stubble, is lined beyond his years; his hands twitch perpetually. He gives every impression of a man living on nerves and adrenalin. Yet his mind is razor-sharp. Politically and musically he is a master tactician.

Other conductors have made famous political gestures. Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the ruins of the Berlin Wall. Simon Rattle pointedly conducted the same work at Mauthausen concentration camp, outside Linz, soon after Jörg Haider’s right-wing Freedom Party entered government in Austria. Daniel Barenboim, an Israeli, appalled many Zionist Jews by playing concerts in Ramallah. And Mstislav Rostropovich rushed to Moscow in 1991 to join Boris Yeltsin in the besieged White House. However, none of those figures was, or is, as closely allied to a country’s political elite as Gergiev is to Putin.

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