Renowned Russian conductor Valery Gergiev's gig at Italian palace canceled amid outcry over support for Putin
Russian maestro Valery Gergiev had been scheduled to lead an ensemble of Italian musicians and soloists from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre — where he's the artistic director — on July 27 at the Reggia di Caserta, an opulent 18th-century palace near Naples.
Italy's national news agency ANSA said the venue had canceled the concert, offering no explanation. A representative at the Reggia di Caserta confirmed the cancelation to CBS News over the phone.
The move came after criticism from Italian lawmakers, human rights advocates and Russian political dissidents.
Among the most vocal opponents to Italy welcoming Gergiev was Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. She condemned Gergiev's public support for the Kremlin and accused the conductor of using his platform to legitimize Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
In a message posted on social media, Navalnaya called news of the cancelation, "not joyful, but good."
"No artist who supports the current dictatorship in Russia should be welcomed in Europe. It is precisely thanks to regime loyalists like Gergiev that Putin tries to promote his image as a 'respectable person' in the West," she said. "It's a small step, but great victories are built from such small steps."
Gergiev, once lauded in the West as the "Wild Man of Music," has become a contentious figure in recent years, particularly in Europe, where a range of institutions have sought to distance themselves from artists aligned with the Russian government.
Gergiev's refusal to denounce Russia's invasion of Ukraine has cost him engagements at other top-tier venues, including New York's Carnegie Hall and Germany's Munich Philharmonic, where he previously served as chief conductor.
The cancellation drew sharp criticism from the Russian Foreign Ministry, which on Wednesday accused Italy of cultural censorship and claimed the move was the result of Ukrainian pressure.
"We strongly condemn such discriminatory attempts at 'cancel culture,' carried out by the Italian authorities," Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a statement, accusing Italy of caving to pressure from Ukraine.
Italian officials did not immediately comment publicly on the cancellation.
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Digital Trends
5 minutes ago
- Digital Trends
Mafia: The Old Country review: a game without an identity
Mafia: The Old Country MSRP $50.00 Score Details 'Mafia: The Old Country is a game struggling with an identity crisis that ends up crumbling as a result.' Pros Lovingly authentic world Impeccable performances Cons Barebones shooting and stealth Clunky knife combat Plot takes too long to get going Recommended Videos A poignant line from the early hours of Mafia: The Old Country states that we can choose who we are, not what we do. I kept that line in my head as I experienced this historical take on the crime franchise. The further I dove into the world Hanger 13 has crafted, the less apt that quote felt. It isn't just the fact that Mafia: The Old Country opted to take a more linear route than the last entry, but how the game itself never seems to settle on what it wants to be. This is a game struggling with an identity crisis that ends up crumbling as a result of disjointed gameplay systems and a protagonist who spends too long feeling like an observer than a driving force. Mafia media and tropes are so well-known and ingrained into pop culture that creating a new story that is both authentic and engaging is borderline impossible. The Old Country's strategy is to go all the way back to the origins of the mafia in early 1900s Sicily and follow Enzo's rise into the life of crime. At least in the case of the former, it is a wild success. Enzo's story begins with promise, but he spends much too long feeling like he's simply along for the ride. Without a solid focus on what kind of game it needs to be or a protagonist with strong enough motivation to rally behind, the entire experience begins to fracture. An offer you can't refuse As a franchise, the Mafia games each veered closer and closer to a GTA-like in terms of gameplay and structure. With Mafia: The Old Country, Hanger 13 decided to scale back the experience to a tight, focused experience. And while this isn't a purely linear game, somehow its handful of gameplay systems all still feel barebones at best and clunky at worst. Gunplay works, but not even the period-appropriate weapons can give it any sense of identity. The three core pillars of The Old Country are third-person shooting, stealth, and one-on-one knife duels, although I could argue that walking, talking, and doing chores are the bulk of the gameplay. As I cycled through each, with some unique setpieces like race or chase sequences sprinkled in, I quickly realized there was no part of them that I was looking forward to. The gunplay is technically the best, but it is about as basic a cover shooter as you can get. Encounters all boil down to going into cover and playing stop-and-pop with the enemies. I might get rushed by an enemy here or there, or flushed out by a grenade, but this is about as forgettable a shooter as can be. Gunplay works, but not even the period-appropriate weapons can give it any sense of identity. Stealth is perhaps a worse offender here. Enemy AI is comically braindead and doing each section as intended is needlessly tedious. The Old Country tries to take a page out of The Last of Us's approach here by having long struggles as Enzo chokes out a guard, which can be skipped by using your knife at the cost of durability. Yet without the survival themes or intelligent AI backing it up, it feels like a time-waster. I can toss coins or bottles to distract enemies, and even activate a listen mode equivalent to see enemies through walls for some reason. I completely ignored the mechanic of picking up bodies to dump them into crates after my first few stealth missions when I realized there was no point in spending all that time picking them up and transporting them — not once was a body I choked out discovered before I snuck through the area. this isn't so much a world to be explored but a container for hundreds of collectibles. Knife fighting was heavily marketed and could've been the feature The Old Country could hang its hat on. But not only does it not gel with the other two disparate gameplay modes, but taken on its own, it might be the weakest of them all. These duels bring the action in tight and swap the controls to something more akin to an action game, but feel weightless and unresponsive. There are two types of attacks, a dodge, a parry, and a guard break. Each move has its place and use, but the way duels play out never made me feel like I was mastering a system. Spacing and range always felt weird, and reading animations felt loose on everything but moves I was meant to dodge since they were the only ones accompanied by a visual indicator. The moment I really began to question what The Old Country's identity was was when the game opened up. Hanger 13 made it clear this game wasn't an open world, but that isn't completely true. There is a decently sized hub world that, at points, I am free to explore by car. But much like Mafia 2, this isn't so much a world to be explored or admired but a container for hundreds of collectibles. There are even vendors and later an apartment out there to visit, but the lack of waypoint system makes exploring or rounding up those collectibles a chore. It feels like a half-step into open world that confuses more than it adds. Welcome to the family The introduction to our new protagonist working slave laborer in a mine had tons of potential that was sadly never capitalized upon. Instead, Enzo abandons his early ambitions as soon as he makes his escape and is taken under the wing of the Torrisi family. At this point, he almost becomes a blank slate, just going along with no goals or personal motivations. A romance with the Don's daughter is rushed along to give him some purpose later, but Enzo's lack of personal stake in anything for the majority of the game makes it hard to get invested in his integration into the crime family. Thankfully the supporting cast of mobsters is far stronger. Don Torrisi is a bit of your stereotypical raspy-voiced father figure who values family, honor, and loyalty above all, but the interplay between the straight-laced and kind Luca and the entitled and brash Ceasare is a standout. I loved getting to know them through the more episodic structure the first half of the game takes, but that slow burn ends up feeling meandering without Enzo having a consistent driver throughout. I spent the majority of the game feeling like I was doing a series of disassociated side quests that ran the gamut of mob activities. I spent the majority of the game feeling like I was doing a series of disassociated side quests. Mafia: The Old Country is a game at war with itself. None of the pieces it puts down fit together to form a unified picture. It lacks any standout gameplay system to build around, nor a strong character with clear motivations to give the game a distinct identity. It is a game that feels torn between multiple different directions, with the only piece left unscathed being the strong performances, an authentic historical setting, and the writing of the supporting cast. However, that can't hold up a barebones gameplay experience and narrative hook that takes way too long to take hold. This is one offer you can safely refuse. Mafia: The Old Country was tested on PC.
CNET
5 minutes ago
- CNET
Mafia: The Old Country Is a Restrictive Crime Drama That Falls Short
Mafia: The Old Country, from developer Hangar 13, is the fourth entry in the Mafia franchise, which started in 2002. The open-world game series, mainly focusing on the Italian mafia's organized criminal activities in fictional US cities, came out less than a year after Grand Theft Auto III, which firmly established the open-world style of gaming. While the Mafia games didn't have the mayhem of GTA, what they offered instead was a compelling storyline that kept you glued to your controller. Mafia: The Old Country, however, doesn't have that or much else, as the game lacks so much of the substance in its big, open world that made previous games so rich and enjoyable. In The Old Country, players step into the role of Enzo, a young man who was sold to a sulfur mine in Sicily by his father to pay off his debts in 1904. Establishing the game in Italy is a departure for the series, which had previously followed mob classics like The Godfather in setting its stories in America with the fictional cities Lost Haven and Empire Bay as stand-ins for Chicago and New York City. It's a promising start, but the game's smaller scale -- its $50 pricetag suggests a more limited scope than the $70 and even $80 AAA games launching these days -- becomes apparent as the game progresses. After a collapse of the mine nearly cost him his life, Enzo escapes to a nearby vineyard owned by Don Torrisi, one of the heads of the local mafia families. The Don takes in Enzo, not because he has a compassionate heart, but the need for muscle: men from a rival family have been trespassing on his land, showing a lack of respect. Enzo starts off as one of the hired hands on the vineyard but falls deeper into the criminal underworld as the Don gives him more and more important tasks. Each chapter plays out a certain important event over the course of four years as Enzo becomes part of the Torrisi family. There is even an initiation ceremony into the family that is similar to the one depicted in other mafia films and shows like The Sopranos. The Old Country is intended to be somewhat accurate to the time period, but not so realistic that it drags down the fun. In every chapter, Enzo has to complete some tasks that usually involve a bit of driving or riding a horse somewhere, a stealth sequence, some sort of firefight, and a very dramatic knife fight that becomes formulaic. Ultimately, the game feels just so restrictive in its reliance on scripted story beats that abandon the freeform nature of earlier Mafia games. More scripted than The Godfather Trilogy One of my biggest gripes about Mafia: The Old Country is how scripted it is. There is just no semblance of freedom within the game, dictating specific experiences with the illusion of chance and randomness. For example, over the course of the game, Enzo has to compete in two races: one with a horse and the other in a car. In both cases, I screwed up early on in the competition and lagged far behind, but I progressed against the other racers with some sharp turns and not-so-legal tactics like bumping my horse into other riders. Thing is, once I passed another racer, it seemed like the game went ahead and stopped having that racer try, so I didn't really need much reason to check my tail to see if the guy I passed up was going to catch up to me because they seemed to just stop bothering. The same goes for the enemies in shootouts. They get behind some cover, and some will, for whatever reason, just walk right to you while shooting. There is no sense of urgency or concern when they get shot; they're just scripted to move forward. It's just constant through missions, where once you reach a certain point, the sequence changes on a dime with no hint of a natural transition from playing stealthy to having a firefight. 2K Games Where this was really baffling was in the areas of San Celeste where the townspeople gathered. If you're thinking about doing some typical GTA-like mayhem, well, you can forget about it. In these areas, you can't pull a gun, which is fine, but on the outskirts of these areas, you can. There is a bit of a failsafe that you can't shoot at the people, although some may react when you pull a gun out and point it at them. You can, however, throw a grenade, and the grenade doesn't do a damn thing. No injuries, no one running around, no reaction, nothing. The townspeople just stick to their script, and that's it. It's just a shame how closed off this game feels. You have all the tools to really have some fun and engage with the fantasy of being a criminal in a nearly lawless land, and the developers did pretty much everything possible to make sure you don't go off-script. Whacked by the frame rate The presentation for The Old Country has its share of issues for me. To start, I was provided with a PC code, which isn't my preferred platform to game on, and for the exact issue I came across. My desktop isn't top of the line with its GeForce RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5 3600, but it handles the newest games fine enough, and for whatever reason, I was getting constant slowdown going in and out of sequences. When I first booted up the game, it automatically set my graphics settings between mid and high, which is typical for most games, and I dealt with laggy transitions from an action sequence into a cutscene and vice versa. The Old Country does require a fair amount of power, but I never had my PC chug along this much for a new game, which makes me hope that this will be fixed in a day-one optimization patch. Another issue in the presentation was the sound editing. The voice actors did a great job in bringing their characters to life. In particular, Don Torrisi, played by Jonny Santiago, was just a thrill. As soon as Torrisi was introduced, I already felt that charisma that someone who runs a crime family would have, and when he gets pissed, you can feel it in your bones. However, in between some fine voice acting, there were some noticeable moments when I could tell that the sound editing didn't give that natural spacing you'd expect when two people are talking. There were also moments when you could hear that maybe they didn't use the best take of the line reading. 2K Games The graphics are, for a lack of a better word, fine. The character models were detailed, but not to an exceptional degree. The same could be said for the part of Sicily the game takes place. I just didn't see that one spot that had me wanting to stop everything and take a look at the land around, which is a shame given the shift from American cities to the sprawling Italian countryside. Another bright spot was the score. It was filled with different pieces that felt authentic for the time period -- symphonic strings and other classical Italian fare -- yet also dramatic and really added to those tense moments. He pulls a knife, you pull a knife, that's the San Celeste way Combat in Mafia, for the most part, is fairly standard for a third-person open-world action game that takes place in the early 1900s. It's a lot of shooting with revolvers, shotguns and rifles, with them having different stopping power, ammo capacity and accuracy. What's unique in this game is the knives. The array of blades available to the player is quite extensive, more so than the guns, and they play a big part in the game beyond combat. During the stealth sequences, Enzo uses a knife to immediately kill enemies instead of mashing a button to choke them out. There is a group of knives that he can throw to take out enemies from a distance. The blade can lose its sharpness as it's being used to open locks on doors and lockboxes, as well as killing people, so there are some knives with increased durability, which can be reset whenever you pick up a whetstone that enemies will just happen to have on them. Where the knife really comes into play are the one-on-one fights. These tend to be duels that close out a whole combat sequence and, toward the end of the game, involve more prominent characters. These fights are dramatic but nothing exceptional, satisfying a story beat but not thrilling in gameplay. For these dramatic encounters, Enzo and his enemy have their own life bar and need to slice each other up with slashes, a thrust attack to reach farther-away enemies, a power attack to break through the defenses of a blocking enemy, and a dodge and parry. If you haven't figured it out yet, this is just paper-rock-scissors, but you know, with knives -- which is fine if predictable. There are no quicktime events during the fights, just occasional breaks where Enzo and his opponent tussle around some more before it goes back into duel mode. It's all, once again, by the script, and while they can be quite dramatic, it's simply not particularly special. Maybe there were a lot of knife fights in the early days of the mafia, I have no idea, I'm not a mafia historian, but this feels like it was intended to give the combat some flair. The game takes place in the 1900s, so there are no machine guns, rocket launchers or flamethrowers, and the developers thought that giving these very dramatic sequences could help add to both the historical realism of the time while keeping it exciting. If that's the case, that notion is The Old Country's shortcoming. I have this beautiful landscape that is not really available to explore until you complete the game and unlock Explore mode. Once I do some venturing, I find there's not much to see, and in some cases, the architecture makes no sense, with stairways going up to just brick walls. I meet these interesting characters who I'd like to know more about and would be willing to spend time with, but I can't and will only see them when they're allowed during missions. It could be that my decades of playing open-world games since GTA III came out are leading me to expect so much more from an open-world game. Mafia is not GTA, and The Old Country does keep to the linear style of the first two games, but it's just so limiting. While I wasn't hoping for an RPG, a little more freedom would keep me from feeling railroaded into a single story. At least in the first Mafia game, I can get fined for speeding, while in this game, I can speed through the countryside without a worry. I would have liked to see Mafia: The Old Country give me more to sink my teeth into. This is not about length, which comes in at around 12 to 15 hours to complete, but more about having some meat on the bone. If it's about giving me a cinematic drama to play before me, then really give it to me instead of a very typical love story up until the last hour or so. My hopes were high for Mafia: The Old Country, and the game didn't satisfy. Mafia: The Old Country comes out Friday on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for $50.
New York Times
7 minutes ago
- New York Times
Luxuriate in Sicily With a Threatening Mafia Family
Tradition can go both ways. In the early-20th-century Sicily where Mafia: The Old Country takes place, tradition is a powerful force. It makes certain men rich while forcing everyone else to fall in line — to follow code and be loyal — or die. But tradition also brings comfort in the form of festive celebrations, brotherhood and belonging. It allows people to feel connected to their land and their history in the face of an unknown and frightening future. The Old Country is a traditional video game, and that's a good thing. Next to the trend of games as endless online experiences, it is small and discrete, like a sawed-off shotgun tucked inside a crate of lemons. Though it's backed by a fleshed-out and explorable open world, most of the game takes place along a linear path. It tells the story of Enzo's rise through the ranks of the Torrisi family, one of several warring clans. The narrative's crescendos and reveals provide the game's main source of excitement and discovery, distinct from the collectibles and exploration of popular open-world fare like the Assassin's Creed or Far Cry games. Resisting the expectation for single-player games to be chockablock with content, The Old Country is sparing and restrained. Its pacing, especially in the first few chapters, is slow and deliberate. Walking as Enzo often feels more natural and rewarding than breaking out into a sprint. It's the best way to take in the postcard beauty of Hangar 13's depiction of Sicily, and to listen in on the conversations between other characters. This world is believable and well-realized. The sprawling Torrisi vineyard, your home base for much of the game, is alive with activity: Cars and horse-drawn carriages come and go constantly, workers pick grapes out in the field, cooks and maids chatter in the kitchen. There's a lot to soak in, and The Old Country seems designed to encourage taking your time doing so. It takes several hours before Enzo is required to fire his gun, opting instead to wave it threateningly at balking victims of the Torrisi protection racket. He finds it better still to sneak into their storehouses, using the game's basic but functional stealth system, and grab their goods without need for violence. Naturally, things will get bloodier, but stealth is almost always an option, as are the scripted one-on-one knife fights that are a central component of the game. The Old Country's story is relatively short and to the point. Players will witness Enzo's meteoric rise, from a childhood of indentured servitude at a sulfur mine to one of the most trusted Torrisi soldiers, in the span of 12 to 14 hours. The open world mostly flashes by as you drive to your next destination. There's not much time to spare. In the backdrop is a smoldering volcano whose earthshaking tremors kick off the game's plot. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
