Article: 'I don't want us to be only remembered for Beslan'; Valery Gergiev's friends in his native Ossetia lost loved ones in the horrific school siege. His benefit concert on Sunday is not about money, he says, but healing.

Byline: NORMAN LEBRECHT

ON THE day of the Beslan school massacre two months ago this week, Valery Gergiev was due to conduct the opening concert of the Vienna Philharmonic season. Racked with grief and fear for loved ones, he contemplated pulling out and flying home. But the programme was suitably sombre: the D-minor concerto by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique symphony. That night, Austrian television showed Gergiev conducting the Pathetique with tears rolling down his unshaven cheeks.

"The most terrible concert of my life," he calls it.

He booked a flight to Moscow and went on national television, appealing to the people of Ossetia to ...

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