On September 22, 2002 the Centre’s chief consultant, Mstislav Rostropovic, addressed the audience gathered at the Centre at the start of a much-awaited meeting with the People’s Artist of the USSR, Professor, and winner of numerous national and international awards, Boris Pokrovsky. Each meeting with the world-renowned maestro is a veritable one-man show and the master class he gave at the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre was certainly no exception. The artistic director of Moscow’s Chamber Musical Theater who has spawned many great singers, conductors and directors, filled the Centre’s students in on his idea of stage work’s super-fine texture, the indispensable qualities of top-drawer performers of any operatic part, on the way roles are created and played, on the actor s charm, the esthetic tastes of various times and peoples, and, of course, he talked about Stanislavsky’s system which is often ignored in opera. The meeting gave the students a unique chance of getting first-hand experience of the working methods used by this world-famous opera director whose artistic endeavor has spanned the past seven decades. Always a devout fan of Pokrovsky’s, Galina Vishnevskaya extols him as an Idol and Teacher. The great director and the great singer have spent much time working together at the Bolshoi Theater and this mutually-rewarding collaboration produced a raft of excellent productions, among them Aida by Giuseppe Verdi, Tosca by Giacchomo Puccini, The Gambler and War and Peace by Sergei Prokofyev, to name just a few, which have gone down in world operatic history.