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Russia Today
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Russia Today
Italian governor defies EU calls to cancel renowned Russian conductor
Vincenzo De Luca, the governor of the Italian region of Campania, has refused to cancel a performance by Valery Gergiev despite pressure from EU officials, who have criticized the renowned Russian conductor for his stance on the Ukraine conflict. Gergiev is scheduled to perform at the Un'Estate da RE festival in Caserta on July 27, alongside the Philharmonic Orchestra of Salerno and soloists from Russia's Mariinsky Theater. The announcement of his performance sparked a backlash in Brussels. European Parliament Vice President Pina Picierno has called for Gergiev to be replaced, accusing De Luca of 'financing a supporter of a criminal regime' by inviting the conductor. European Commission spokeswoman Eva Hrncirova also chimed in, warning European venues against hosting individuals 'who justify Kremlin aggression.' In a series of statements on social media, De Luca rejected calls to ban the Russian conductor. 'Culture and art are spaces where dialogue can flourish and the values of human solidarity can take root,' he wrote, adding that 'Campania is a region of unity' which has always promoted 'encounters between people of diverse sensibilities.' In a separate video address, he spoke out against mixing politics and culture. 'The world of culture, art, and sports must remain free from politics and political agendas. It should be a space where dialogue, solidarity, and mutual understanding among people and nations can grow,' he said, adding that he will not cancel the performance. Picierno renewed her attacks on De Luca and Gergiev on Friday, calling it unacceptable to host people who back the Kremlin. Nevertheless, the concert will go ahead as planned, Italian media and the BBC reported on Saturday, citing sources close to the organizers and the conductor's spokesman. Gergiev, one of Russia's most acclaimed musicians, was ousted from the Munich Philharmonic and banned across the West in 2022 after refusing to denounce Russia's military operation against the Kiev regime. Carnegie Hall, the Met Opera, and other major venues also canceled performances by Gergiev and other Russian artists with any public ties to Moscow's policies regarding Ukraine. Moscow has condemned the bans as Russophobic censorship, saying efforts to 'cancel' Russian culture will fail.
Russia Today
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Russia Today
Italian governor defies EU calls to cancel Russian concert
Vincenzo De Luca, the governor of the Italian region of Campania, has refused to cancel a performance by Valery Gergiev despite pressure from EU officials, who have criticized the renowned Russian conductor for his stance on the Ukraine conflict. Gergiev is scheduled to perform at the Un'Estate da RE festival in Caserta on July 27, alongside the Philharmonic Orchestra of Salerno and soloists from Russia's Mariinsky Theater. The announcement of his performance sparked a backlash in Brussels. European Parliament Vice President Pina Picierno has called for Gergiev to be replaced, accusing De Luca of 'financing a supporter of a criminal regime' by inviting the conductor. European Commission spokeswoman Eva Hrncirova also chimed in, warning European venues against hosting individuals 'who justify Kremlin aggression.' In a series of statements on social media, De Luca rejected calls to ban the Russian conductor. 'Culture and art are spaces where dialogue can flourish and the values of human solidarity can take root,' he wrote, adding that 'Campania is a region of unity' which has always promoted 'encounters between people of diverse sensibilities.' In a separate video address, he spoke out against mixing politics and culture. 'The world of culture, art, and sports must remain free from politics and political agendas. It should be a space where dialogue, solidarity, and mutual understanding among people and nations can grow,' he said, adding that he will not cancel the performance. Picierno renewed her attacks on De Luca and Gergiev on Friday, calling it unacceptable to host people who back the Kremlin. Nevertheless, the concert will go ahead as planned, Italian media and the BBC reported on Saturday, citing sources close to the organizers and the conductor's spokesman. Gergiev, one of Russia's most acclaimed musicians, was ousted from the Munich Philharmonic and banned across the West in 2022 after refusing to denounce Russia's military operation against the Kiev regime. Carnegie Hall, the Met Opera, and other major venues also canceled performances by Gergiev and other Russian artists with any public ties to Moscow's policies regarding Ukraine. Moscow has condemned the bans as Russophobic censorship, saying efforts to 'cancel' Russian culture will fail.
New York Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Russian Maestro, Shunned in West Over Putin Support, Will Conduct in Italy
Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro who has been shunned in the West because of his close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, will appear this month at a festival in Italy, his first engagement in Western Europe since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Mr. Gergiev, a staunch ally of Mr. Putin who has helped promote the president's policies, is set to conduct on July 27 at the Royal Palace of Caserta, a historic site north of Naples, the Un'Estate da RE festival announced last week. He will lead an orchestra from Salerno, Italy, in a program featuring performers from the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which Mr. Gergiev leads. The announcement drew protests from Italian politicians and activists, who expressed concern that Mr. Gergiev was being allowed to perform again in the West. Mr. Gergiev, whose extensive international career once made him one of the busiest maestros in the world, has been declared unwelcome in the United States and Europe since the Russian invasion. Mr. Gergiev did not respond to a request for comment. The decision to engage Mr. Gergiev also drew criticism because the festival is bankrolled by the European Union. Its funding flows, via Italy's national government, to a company owned by the Campania region, where the festival takes place. The company funds several cultural events throughout the region, including Un'Estate da RE. Pina Picierno, a left-leaning Italian politician who serves as a vice president of the European Parliament, said that it was 'unacceptable that European funds are being used to finance the performance of a Kremlin supporter.' In a post on X, she called on the festival and on regional officials 'to take immediate action to prevent Valery Gergiev's participation and ensure that taxpayers' money does not end up in the pockets of a supporter of a criminal regime.' Vincenzo De Luca, the center-left president of the Campania region, defended the festival's decision to engage Mr. Gergiev in a statement. He said the invitation showed that 'dialogue between people can grow and the values of human solidarity can develop.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unfinished Opera Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant
Instead of finishing his masterpiece 'Khovanshchina,' Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That's fiction: a scene from 'Moscow-Petushki,' a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of 'Khovanshchina' that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history. 'Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,' McBurney said in an interview. In real life, Mussorgsky 'embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,' McBurney added. 'And he couldn't finish it.' McBurney has created a new, completed 'Khovanshchina,' and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a 'musical folk drama'), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film. McBurney called his contribution to the palimpsest of 'Khovanshchina' a bridge, built from melodic sketches, between Mussorgsky's music and the Stravinsky finale. Last year, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed a concert version of McBurney's completion. On Saturday, it will be staged in Salzburg, with the same conductor and orchestra, and directed by McBurney's brother, Simon. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, it will travel to New York in the future. A recent rehearsal of 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg showed the work coming together with a striking, contemporary vision. The piece concerns political intrigue in 1682, but this performance features a blunt, vernacular new translation of the libretto; a staging of skin-crawling immediacy; and a fierce, unsentimental reading of the score. Rather than neatly tying up loose ends, this production embraces the work's unfinished state. McBurney's bridge is fragmentary, sounding neither quite like Mussorgsky nor like an original piece. Hearing it, you can't forget how much is still missing from 'Khovanshchina.' 'We both agreed that it should be very simple, and instead of trying to create continuity between these bits and pieces, we should just accept that there isn't any,' Salonen said in an interview. 'These are fragments, and it just kind of is what it is.' McBurney has been fascinated with Mussorgsky since he was 14, when his father, the archaeologist Charles McBurney, traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss his research findings with scholars. Charles mentioned to his K.G.B. minder that his son was fascinated by classical music; the minder gave him an enormous case of recordings from the state-owned label Melodiya to bring back to England. Those introduced Gerard to Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Boris Godunov.' He soon became captivated by 'Khovanshchina' as well. 'I was always interested in its fragmentary and unfinished nature,' he said. In 1984, Gerard McBurney moved to Moscow, where he learned Russian and studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. That experience has been invaluable for his work on 'Khovanshchina.' In addition to the musical reconstruction, McBurney has been making a contemporary English version of the libretto, with the translator Hannah Whitley, that preserves the original's vernacular. In one scene, the authoritarian Prince Ivan Khovansky tells the fanatical leader of the Old Believers, Dositheus, 'Together we will make Russia great again.' At another point, the title of the opera — often rendered as 'The Khovansky Affair' — is translated as something unprintable. Such choices capture the idiosyncratic style of the Russian libretto, which Mussorgsky developed, collagelike, from an obsessive study of the historical record and careful attention to the way people spoke on the street. 'He built himself an armature, and then he stuck these random bits on it,' McBurney said. 'And then, as the piece possessed him over the years, he started to weave in his own dreamlike riffs on the material.' Simon McBurney, the co-founder and artistic director of the theater company Complicité and an actor, is also interested in the work's contemporary resonances. His staging places it firmly within present-day authoritarianism. But, he said in an interview, the story of 'Khovanshchina' hardly needs updating. In the drama, there are no heroes, only ambivalent villains. Power asserts itself mercilessly, and the action is shot through with apocalyptic premonitions, which reminds him of our time. 'The young people I know sense the presence of the shadow, and therefore the impending catastrophe,' McBurney said. 'I'm not trying to bring it into the staging of the opera. It is there already.' Still, experience has taught him that relevance and realism are not the same thing. McBurney knows that the naturalistic acting style used in film can easily fall flat in opera, which has a slower pace in which the magic lies in a kind of zooming in on time. For 'Khovanshchina,' he worked with the singers to 'heighten' their acting, he said, making the movements onstage both slower and more intense. 'My job as a director is to get them — sometimes to teach them — how to hold the gesture in the body,' he said. 'Root it in the reality, but also find the dynamic form with the body which can work with the dynamic form of the music.' In Salonen's reading of that music, Mussorgsky's score is lean, metallic and very fast. Older recordings of 'Khovanshchina' tend to be sumptuous and Romantic, luxuriating in the composer's folk-inspired melodies. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra renders the same melodies as ephemeral as the bits of text from which Mussorgsky assembled his libretto. Mussorgsky's unusual spinning modulations convey the feeling of events spiraling out of control. 'I thought from the start that it shouldn't linger, because history is moving really fast at this point,' Salonen said. 'There are some moments of calm — little oasis moments — but it should never be static.' Still, the past has had a way of inserting itself into this production. The Russian mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina sings the part of Marfa, who is caught between love and the strict dogmas of the Old Believers. Some of Karyazina's ancestors on her father's side were members of that faith. They never talked about it, until her grandfather told her about her roots while they were listening to a scene from 'Khovanshchina' on the radio. A tragedy of Mussorgsky's drama is how political upheaval severs connections among people, their land and their history. 'People want to feel that they're not just a bit of fluff and when they die, there will be nothing left of them,' Gerard McBurney said. 'Somehow, if they could feel that their roots drew from the soil they loved when they were first growing up — that's a constant theme in the text of this opera. It's the longing for an impossible dream.'
