"Exceptionally good-natured, with a wonderful sense of humor, Alexander may not have been the world's leading "sprinter" performing seven programs a week, but he was certainly a wonderful "stayer" who was able to count on running the longest distances and achieve the highest artistic result at the same time.
Everything that Vedernikov failed to reorganize in the Russian opera, someone will still have to do it — a decade earlier or later. It depends on the pace of development of our country: both structural and purely human development."
"He brilliantly knew opera scores and all the subtleties of the art of opera conducting. He had a talent of huge scale and vast knowledge. And beside that, Alexander was characterized by those rare qualities that are so lacking in our country for many managers — long-term planning and daily painstaking work to move towards the goal.
However, these qualities are completely incompatible with the administrative leapfrog and with the aimlessness that reigns in the upper echelons of cultural appointees. Therefore, the “broad public” can only admire the most famous productions of Vedernikov, such as “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, “Eugene Onegin”, “The Flying Dutchman” or “The Fiery Angel”, but only unbiased specialists can recognize Vedernikov's strategy for the development of the Bolshoi Theater, its structural “Europeanization” and realize the full scale of this personality".