Vakhtang Jordania

Vakhtang Jordania (In Georgian: ვახტანგ ჟორდანია) (born 9 December 1943, Tbilisi, Georgian SSR, Soviet Union - died 4 October 2005 Broadway, Virginia, United States) was a Georgian conductor.

Born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia on Dec. 9, 1943, Maestro Jordania studied piano from the age of five. After graduating from the Tbilisi Conservatory, he studied symphonic and operatic conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating with honors. A top prize at the 1971 Herbert von Karajan Competition catapulted him to the highest circle of Soviet artistry. From his assistantship with the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky until his defection to the United States in 1983, Mr. Jordania held positions as music director of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, the Saratov Philharmonic, and the Kharkiv Philharmonic. The Tchaikovsky Competition was under his baton twice. Conducting for more than one hundred concerts a year, he regularly toured the USSR, collaborating with musicians such as David and Igor Oistrakh, Leonid Kogan, Dmitri Shostakovich, Kiril Kondrashin, and Emil Gilels.

He defected to the West by being driven across the Finnish-Swedish border in Haaparanta to Luleå, Sweden, and on to by Jyrki Koulumies, a Finnish journalist. In Sweden, Jordania and his then lover, Victoria Mullova, applied where taken by Swedish secret police to safehouse. They treated by the authorities as just like any other political defectors from the Eastern Bloc: they suggested that the couple stay in a safehouse over the weekend until the American embassy opened where they applied political asylum. So for two days they sat under false names in a safehouse room, not even daring to go down to outside because their photographs were on the front page of every Swedish and international newspaper. Two days later they were in Washington, D.C. with American visas in their pockets.

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