I was probably not even one year old when I was first taken to the dacha that my grandfather and grandmother built together in 1956. The Soviet Union was giving some free land to government employees at the time, but to have a good location it was necessary to make “a special money gift” to one of the bureaucrats. My first real memories of the house are from when I was about three. From then on I used to spend every summer there, from the middle of May until September. It was too cold to stay there after that, and all my family lived in St Petersburg in the winter months.

The dacha was in a village called Vaskelovo and its railway station was known as “54 kilometres”, the distance from St Petersburg. My parents used to come out to see me almost every weekend. When I was seven I started at the St Petersburg State Academic Capella, which is Russia’s oldest choir school — Peter the Great brought it to St Petersburg from Moscow. Only 25 pupils were awarded places after a competition involving 460 youngsters. I was there until I was 17, and every day someone told me: “You will be a choral conductor.”

From home I travelled for one and a quarter hours to the Capella and the same back every day, so I soon started to travel alone by train to my grandparents’ house in my school holidays. It was the most exciting time of the year.

All the houses in Vaskelovo were made of wood, and I helped my grandparents to paint theirs, first when I was about eight and then again when I was 20. We painted it a salad colour — white/green.

It was very simple: two levels built on brick columns, with steps up to the door. In Russia we do not have a ground floor like you, we start at one. So on the first floor, there were two bedrooms and one small reception room, while upstairs had a big loft space and another bedroom.

We had power from the beginning, electricity but no gas, and there was a water pipe. But we only had water, which we collected in big barrels, for one hour every two days. We also had a well with a pump. There was no bathroom, not even a shower. Instead we had a special device outside, a metal can which held four or five litres of water, which was warmed by the sun. You pulled out a metal stick which let some water out to wash your face.

We also needed water for the vegetables. My grandmother grew potatoes, cabbages, zucchini and Hallowe’en fruits — pumpkins. We had a special construction of glass or plastic that kept the air warm inside and in which we grew cucumbers, tomatoes, and so on. I used to go mushroom-hunting, which is a Russian tradition. We eat a lot of different varieties, maybe 40 or 50.

I would also go fishing in one of the five beautiful lakes around the village — we had views of one of them from the house. I’m not sure what kind of fish I caught, but I would bring it back and salt it for one to three days, maybe a week, then dry it in the air. It is a special tradition and I think it is the best dish to eat with beer.

There was a separate building made of tiny wooden panels which we used for a kitchen. It had an electric plate in it but my grandmother mainly cooked using wood in the closed brick fireplace. It was much faster than electricity. Because it was built between two rooms, it would make them warm all night.

But my grandmother — she is called Nina — was not a very good cook. She was born in 1919 and grew up just after the civil war, so she preferred to cook everything in fat. I only used to eat once a day because the meal was so heavy. My grandfather worked as a driver and came to the house at the weekend. I remember that he slept almost all the time when he stayed at the dacha, although sometimes we would go and cut down a tree together.

The furniture was very simple: a couple of sofas and tables, some chairs. But I remember my parents put a political map of the world on the wall — it was at my height so I could study it. We had a radio, which played official communist/ Soviet songs and a lot of classical music, sometimes live concerts, but there was no musical instrument. I took books along with me — that’s where I read War and Peace.

Since the start of my career, for the past six or seven years I have only been back to the house for a few days each summer, and it is looking rather abandoned now. My grandfather has died and my grandmother is now too old to stay there. My wife, Eugenie, has visited, but not our son Alexander, who is two. Ideally, I would like to have some friends live there, giving me the chance to visit.

The village is much bigger now. It has maybe 2,000 houses, which I know have increased in value. I have no idea how much my grandparents’ house cost to build or what it is worth now, but it might be about £10,000.

Interview by Lynne Greenwood

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