(Bloomberg) -- Conductor Valery Gergiev was named director of Russia’s Bolshoi Theater, putting the longtime supporter of President Vladimir Putin at the head of the country’s most prestigious cultural institution.

Gergiev, 70, was appointed in an order signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. He will remain head of the Mariinsky Theater in Putin’s native St. Petersburg, which brings Russia’s two principal opera and ballet companies under the same leadership.

The renowned conductor is a close ally of Putin who has repeatedly demonstrated support for the Russian president’s military actions. He flew to South Ossetia to lead a performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony after Russia and Georgia fought a 2008 war over the territory, backed Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and conducted a concert in the ruins of Syria’s Palmyra in 2016.

“Like many of you, today I am thinking about what to do in Russia,” he said at a meeting with representatives of the Bolshoi, the Interfax news agency reported Friday. They “need to work at home, work a lot, successfully certainly, preserving all the best that both troupes have,” he said.

After Putin ordered the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Gergiev was shunned by leading international orchestras and opera houses for failing to denounce the war. He was dismissed as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and as honorary conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, while the Edinburgh International Festival forced his resignation as honorary president.

His appointment highlights a rise in Russia of “patriotic” nationalism amid increasing cultural and social isolation. Critics of the war have been jailed or forced into exile amid the most sweeping Kremlin crackdown on dissent in decades, while new history textbooks in schools this year praise Putin’s invasion and cast Russia as under attack by the West.

Gergiev replaces Vladimir Urin, who resigned as general director after more than a decade at the Bolshoi. He was among a number of directors of Russian theaters and cultural institutions who signed a letter calling for peace after the war began.

Under Urin, the Bolshoi cooperated with well-known foreign performers and artistic directors before the war began, such as US choreographer John Neumeier and Italian star Jacopo Tissi, who’s currently principal dancer at the Dutch National Ballet. 

Still, it couldn’t avoid controversy as Russia tightened restrictions against so-called “propaganda” of LGBT relationships. A contemporary ballet by Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov about the legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev, which received its world premier at the Bolshoi in 2017, was dropped this year after a law banning promotion of “non-traditional sexual relationships” was expanded.

“We absolutely need to remember that we are a great Russian theater or great Russian theaters,” Gergiev said at the Bolshoi, according to the state-run Tass news service. “There will never be a third theater that can do in a few years what these theaters have done in more than two centuries.”

(Updates with details about Gergiev’s current role in second paragraph and with comment in fourth and tenth paragraphs.)

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