Year: 2022

The Russian Lounge at Washington’s Kennedy Center, a space for high-end donors and meetings, has been re-branded, apparently in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The space, located near the Kennedy Center Opera House, was renovated in 2011 with a $5 million gift from Vladimir Potanin, a Russian billionaire and international arts patron who has been linked to Putin. Potanin also was a trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York until his resignation earlier this month.

Reporting for Politico, Tara Palmeri quotes Kennedy Center spokeswoman Eileen Andrews: “The naming period for the Lounge has now ended. Due to the tragedy in Ukraine, the Kennedy Center and the [Potanin] Foundation have mutually agreed to no longer use the name Russian Lounge.” The space has been renamed the Opera House Circles Lounge:

http://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/kennedy-center-quietly-ditches-its-russian-lounge-00018664

The Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky has been dropped by his talent manager following an appearance on a state-television talk show, during which he charged the West with provoking Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and suggested that Russian forces cut off electricity to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

The management firm, which had represented Berezovsky for nearly 20 years, issued a statement condemning those remarks by the pianist, whom it called a “gifted artist and paradoxical individual.”

Berezovsky has made several attempts to extricate himself. In the latest, he wrote to the English music journalist Norman Lebrecht, citing, among others, John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist who has advocated a “realist” geopolitical strategy on Russia and opposed NATO membership for former Soviet states. Isaac Chotiner, writing in The New Yorker, quoted Mearsheimer as saying, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”

The pianist’s note to Lebrecht:

Boris Berezovsky quotes US crackpot theorists

“ ‘When the guns are booming, the muses remain silent.’ I should have followed this wise adage,” Berezovsky writes. Three weeks ago, that might have been a plausible, self-protective response. Today, fairly or not, silence is widely interpreted as acquiescence. And now that Putin is calling Russians who oppose his war “scum and traitors,” silence may not be an option for much longer.

With Covid-19 infections falling in this area, the Richmond Symphony has eased safety measures for its concerts at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center.

Vaccine checks will no longer be required for admission; but patrons are asked not to attend if they have tested positive for the virus, have been exposed to someone testing positive in the past two weeks, or do not feel well.

Subscribers and single-ticket holders who are ill or have been exposed are eligible for free exchanges of tickets for future concerts.

Patrons over 3 years old are asked to continue wearing masks in the hall.

Carpenter Theatre concessions will reopen and refreshments may be consumed in the hall.

Open seating will resume during pre-concert talks, and the Dominion Energy Center Donor Lounge will reopen, beginning on April 9.

Normal seating will resume for LolliPops and Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra concerts.

For more information, call the symphony’s patron services desk at (804) 788-1212, Ext. 2, or e-mail patronservices@richmondsymphony.com

Julian Wachner, one of leading US choral directors, has been fired by New York’s Trinity Episcopal Church for as-yet unverified charges of sexual misconduct.

A female singer has accused Wachner of making unwelcome advances, which he has denied. “Depriving Mr. Wachner of the benefit of the full narrative is the antithesis of due process and allows distortions to triumph over the truth,” his lawyer, Andrew T. Miltenberg, wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández.

Trinity’s statement on Wachner’s dismissal reads in part: “[W]e have concluded based on recent information that Julian has otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.”

Since 2011, Wachner has been church’s director of music and arts, leading the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and NOVUS NY, and, since 2018, artistic director of the Grand Rapids Bach Festival in Michigan. He was director of The Washington Chorus from 2008 to 2017. He has led ensembles at Spoleto, Tanglewood and other music festivals, and has held several academic posts.

Wachner has been touted as a candidate for director of the Oregon Bach Festival, Hernández reports:

The three largest international recording combines, Sony, Warner and Universal, have suspended operations in Putin’s world. Live Nation, the concert promoter, also announces that “we will not do business with Russia,” The New York Times’ Ben Sisario reports:

Russia already had been ejected from the Eurovision song contest, and Spotify and Apple have restricted access to their streaming services.

Performative gestures, literally – Sisario cites International Federation of the Phonographic Industry data showing Russia to be a smaller market than Mexico and Sweden for recorded music – but also markers of the country’s rapid cultural isolation.

Njioma Grevious, violin
Melissa Reardon, viola
Mary Boodell, flute
Charles Overton, harp
March 6, Seventh Street Christian Church

The latest offering from the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia was a homecoming – and hometown professional debut – for Charles Overton, an alumnus of Richmond Montessori School and the American Youth Harp Ensemble who has become a rising star among US harpists, building a resumé of dates with major orchestras and recital presenters.

Joining three mainstays of the Chamber Music Society – violinist Njioma Grevious, violist Melissa Reardon and flutist Mary Boodell – Overton could be heard in roles ranging from collaborative to supportive, sometimes in the same piece.

The most vivid showcase of his playing came in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie in A major, Op. 124, for violin and harp, a fairly late (1907) work from a very prolific composer whose chamber music and orchestral miniatures often featured unusual instrumental combinations or were written for under-employed instruments. (Name another prominent composer who produced a bassoon sonata or chamber music with trumpet.)

The Saint-Saëns Fantaisie is prime example of two genres of late-romantic and early modern French music: Short-ish, rhapsodic works for violin (Ernest Chausson’s Poème is the best-known of these) and pieces that feature the harp. The modern chromatic instrument was introduced by French builders in the 1890s, and soon figured prominently in music by the country’s composers, notably Maurice Ravel’s, but usually as a rhythmic enhancer (somewhat like a continuo harpsichord) or as a means of enlarging the palette of tone colors.

Saint-Saëns makes the harp a full partner, engaging in a real dialogue with the violin. The exchanges between Grevious and Overton, and the merging of their voices as the piece grows more intense and passionate, amounted to a clinic in the interpretation and performance of high-romantic music. Saint-Saëns also was a classicist, devoted to form, balance and musical symmetry, and this duo projected those qualities as well.

In Claude Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1916), one of the rather austere, expressively elusive chamber works written toward the end of his life, the harp plays quasi-continuo or atmospheric roles behind the alternating leads of flute and viola. The harp is also a sonic mediator between the sharply focused tone of the flute and the darker, at times more earthy or wiry, tone of the viola – a role that Overton filled with keen sensitivity. Boodell and Reardon ably negotiated the shifting moods of this music, a weird tonescape that ranges from pastoral reverie to almost hermetic introspection.

The second half of the program was devoted to music by contemporary composers: “Winterserenade” (1997) by the Lithuanian Onutė Narbutaitė and “The Eye of Night” (2010) by the American David Bruce.

Narbutaitė’s piece for flute, violin and viola, styled as a paraphrase of “Gute Nacht” from Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Die Winterreise,” is more of a deconstruction of the melody in the minimalist yet emotionally resonant style often heard in modern Baltic music. Boodell, Reardon and Grevious nicely realized Narbutaitė’s spare texture and ambivalent moodiness while echoing Schubert’s emotive tone.

Bruce’s “Eye of Night,” scored like the Debussy for flute, viola and harp but more democratically apportioned among the instruments, proved to be considerably less intense, technically and expressively, than the other works on this program, giving listeners a pleasant, at times breezy, sendoff.

Boodell was the star of the piece, juggling three different flutes and varying expressive roles across four movements. Reardon and Overton had their moments, too, especially in pizzicato exchanges, a natural opportunity for interplay between harp and fiddle that Debussy, for whatever reason, rarely exploited.

This post has been corrected to clarify Charles Overton’s educational background in Richmond.

Updated

“Cancel-culture” campaigns to ostracize, silence or deny employment to those expressing views that the campaigners find repellent have been flashpoints in Western societies in recent years, sparking heated debates over suppression of free speech and scrambling alliances across the ideological spectrum.

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine opens a new front in the cultural battle, a thus-far uneven one in which Western businesses, social media, sports leagues, arts institutions and other entities have abruptly cut ties with Russia and with people aligned with its dictator or publicly ambivalent or silent about his actions.

On the other side of the battle line, cancellation – extending to the extremes of exile, imprisonment and murder – is an old story in Russia, long predating Putin’s suppression of internal dissent and recent moves to block information sources that he doesn’t control. Old Soviet-speak is making a comeback: It is now a crime in Russia to call the war a war, as opposed to its official designation as a military “special operation.”

It was already hazardous just to call for peace, as Ivan Velikanov, a French-born conductor of Russian descent now working in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, learned after he opened a Feb. 25 performance in the latter city’s opera house with a speech, after which he led the orchestra in the “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

“I said that war is bad and peace is good. In my naïvete, I assumed there was nothing to argue about. And I said it because the war had just begun,” Velikanov told Anastassia Boutsko in an interview for Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcast service (now on Russia’s list of outlawed foreign media). “I think that today . . . we should call things by their names, as simply as possible.”

He was promptly suspended from the opera house.

“[A] cold civil war is raging in Russia,” dividing its society over “a forbidden topic, a topic that concerns absolutely everyone,” Velikanov said:

http://www.dw.com/en/beethoven-and-a-peace-speech-get-russian-conductor-suspended/a-60996710

(via http://www.artsjournal.com)

In the democratic world, meanwhile, cultural institutions and their constituents are wondering how far to go in the cancellation of Russian artists – how bold a line to draw between figures such as conductor Valery Gergiev, a prominent Putin ally, and the likes of soprano Anna Netrebko, who call themselves apolitical and decry the violence, but without denouncing its instigator.

“Classical music likes to think of itself [as] floating serenely above politics, in a realm of beauty and unity,” The New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe observes.

He contrasts Netrebko’s ambivalence with a statement from the Russian-born German pianist Igor Levit: “Being a musician does not free you from being a citizen, from taking responsibility, from being a grown-up. . . . And never, never bring up music and your being a musician as an excuse. Do not insult art.”

Wolfe suggests a parallel between Gergiev and Wilhelm Furtwängler, who despite being frequently at odds with the Nazis remained in Germany during the Hitler regime and allowed himself to be made its “court conductor.”

He also wonders whether institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Munich Philharmonic, which for years employed Gergiev and others in Putin’s favor, only to break with them quickly once Ukraine was invaded, are now fit to play the roles of outraged innocent parties.

“I understand the reluctance to step away from idyllic notions of exchange and collaboration, even amid conflict,” Woolfe writes; but those who don’t speak out against a dictator’s brutality “should not be surprised that there are consequences.”

I’m of two minds about this. I think it’s unjust to hold artists personally responsible for the behavior of warlords; but I also think that accepting the patronage of an evil regime rubs off, certainly on the artist as a person and not infrequently as an artist.

Conveniently, perhaps, I’ve never had much use for Gergiev. To my ears, his work (which I’ve heard live as well as recorded) is, at best, a sleek echo of the crudely muscular style common in Soviet-era orchestral performance, which does justice to very little music that’s worth hearing. Not being a connoisseur of verismo sopranos, I don’t feel qualified to assess Netrebko’s artistic merits; but I’m sure there are many fine singers to take her place.

I’m not purging my collection of recordings by Furtwängler, Karl Böhm, Willem Mengelberg, Walter Gieseking and others who were Nazis or Nazi-adjacent, or by Soviet-favored artists such as Evgeny Mravinsky and David Oistrakh. I don’t fault Western musicians who performed with the Czech Philharmonic or the Staatskapelle Dresden when those orchestras were cultural jewels of communist regimes; and I don’t credit foreign musicians who’ve boycotted the US when they opposed a president or his policies.

I try not to judge artists by the environments in which they work; but I can’t help noticing that their comfort level in bad environments is quite often reflected in the art they produce. That is a revealing difference between a Dmitri Shostakovich and a Richard Strauss.

Also conveniently, I’m not a Russian music addict. Taking a break from it wouldn’t leave me feeling too gravely deprived. (Short- or medium-term, at least – I won’t forgo Mussorgsky forever.) If I crave Slavic accents, there are plenty of first-rate Czech and Polish composers.

Putin and his cronies and enablers vs. the civilized world is a battle that will – and should – continue for as long as he and his repressive mindset and brutal behavior continue to define Russian policy.

Presenters and consumers of classical music will be drawing moral lines and deciding to cancel some artists for some time.

UPDATE (March 6): Facing conflicting pressures to speak out on the Ukraine war, Tugan Sokhiev, the 44-year-old Russian who has been serving as principal conductor of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and music director of France’s Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse, has resigned from both posts.

“Over the past few days, I have witnessed what I thought I would never see in my life,” Sokhiev told a Russian music website, his remarks quoted on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog. The conductor continues: “In Europe today I am being forced to make a choice and prefer one member of my musical family to another. . . . I cannot see my colleagues – conductors, actors, singers, dancers, directors – threatened, treated disrespectfully, and become victims of a ‘cancellation culture.’ ”

His full statement is worth pondering:

Breaking: Bolshoi chief conductor resigns in both Russia and France

Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony’s music director from 1995 to 2020 and founding conductor of the New World Symphony in Miami, has announced his semi-retirement from the Florida ensemble and plans to scale back his other activities as he copes with an aggressive form of brain cancer.

The 77-year-old conductor last summer underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment for glioblastoma, and is currently in remission, he reported in a statement. “But the future is uncertain as glioblastoma is a stealthy adversary. Its recurrence is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception.”

Tilson Thomas is scheduled to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington in two programs of staples of his repertory, American music and Mahler (the “Resurrection” Symphony [No. 2 in C minor]) between March 25 and April 1 at the Kennedy Center.

His schedule in coming months includes engagements with the Cleveland Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as the New World Symphony, with which he will play a laureate role after retiring as music director. He also plans to continue composing.

The New World Symphony, founded by Tilson Thomas in 1987, is this country’s premier post-graduate orchestral academy, selected from alumni of leading conservatories who after fellowships in Miami typically are hired by professional orchestras and educational institutions in the US and abroad.

For some years, the Richmond Symphony has recruited musicians from this source, notably as principal players. Current New World Symphony alumni are the symphony’s first-stand violinists, concertmaster Daisuke Yamamoto and assistant concertmaster Adrian Pintea; acting associate principal second violinist Jeannette Jang; violinist Stacy Matthews; and four wind principals – oboist Victoria Chung, clarinetist David Lemelin, bassoonist Thomas Schneider and French horn player Dominic Rotella.

Valentina Peleggi conducting
with George Li, piano
Feb. 26-27, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
(Reviewed from online stream, posted March 2)

Music can be an escape, or it can meet the moment. That’s especially true of classical music, which requires a substantial investment of both mind and heart by the listener to be heard as more than a lengthy, complicated construct of sounds. And it can meet the moment unexpectedly: Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy” would not rank high on many lists of anthems for Western civilization, but that’s how it came across in the Richmond Symphony’s first concert after the 9/11 attacks.

Flash forward two decades: The orchestra’s long-planned program of two Russian works, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor, presented a few days after the would-be tsar of today’s Russia, Vladimir Putin, launched his invasion of Ukraine, looked to be a glaring mismatch of music and moment.

It didn’t turn out that way. The ribbons in Ukraine’s national colors, blue and yellow, worn by many of the musicians reflected the sound and spirit of their performance, especially – perhaps surprisingly – in the Shostakovich.

The Rachmaninoff concerto is a product of pre-Soviet Russia, in both its vintage (1901) and its sensibility, by a composer who spent his later years as an émigré in the US and Switzerland – a refugee from the regime that would spawn a Putin.

This music found an advocate of unusual sensitivity in George Li, a 26-year-old Bostonian of Chinese parentage who was a silver medalist at the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition and subsequently has earned international acclaim as an interpreter of Russian repertory.

Li deftly managed the elusive balancing of roles that Rachmaninoff requires of the soloist. The concerto needs a pianist with abundant and tonally brilliant technique and an ear for high-romantic expressivity and rhetorical flourish; but it also needs a musician who knows when and how to collaborate with the orchestra, especially in the instrument’s exchanges with solo winds in the central adagio movement.

Without underplaying its passages of pianistic dazzle or the soulful tunefulness of its main themes, Li was attentive to the subtleties of tone and color and the long arcs of expression that make this concerto more than a virtuoso showpiece with plush orchestral padding. His performance sang and sighed and glittered, but it never gushed or skimmed the surface.

Following the concerto, Li played an encore, Chopin’s Prelude in D flat major, Op. 28, No. 15, with a contemplative, elegiac air that was both profoundly musical and remarkably attuned to the somber, hope-against-hope atmosphere of the world outside the concert hall.

The Shostakovich Fifth, introduced in 1937, was characterized, purportedly by the composer but more likely by some apparatchik ghost-writer, as “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.” In that phrase, the only true adjective is “creative.”

Fanfares and pounding drums notwithstanding, this piece is anything but Stalinist, socialist-realist triumphalism, as anyone who listens to the music that lies between its brassy outbursts can sense immediately. Its big tunes are bleak, introduced mostly by solo instruments playing with stark purity, as lone voices in a spiritual wasteland, and its loudest moments exude more menace than triumph.

In comments at the beginning of the program, Valentina Peleggi, the orchestra’s music director, called the largo movement of the Shostakovich “a powerful cry against any form of brutality,” and observed that, sadly, “little has changed” in the 85 years since its composition.

That verbally signalled a measured, sober reading whose most affecting moments were its quietest, thanks largely to the contributions of the symphony’s wind principals – flutist Mary Boodell, oboist Victoria Chung, clarinetist David Lemelin, bassoonist Thomas Schneider – and the imposingly dark tone of the cello and double-bass sections that served as the foundation of the performance. Brasses and percussion came through with the needed impact, but more as sonic contrast than as emotional climaxes.

It was powerful; but more to the point, it was a compelling lamentation.

The stream of Li’s performance of the Rachmaninoff concerto will be accessible until March 31, and the Shostakovich symphony through June 30. Single-concert access: $30. Full Masterworks season access: $180. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://www.richmondsymphony.com

In 1931, Florence Reese, the wife of a mine workers’ union organizer, wrote a song whose refrain should be ringing in some influential ears:

Which side are on you on, boys?
Which side are you on?

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has forced that question on all sorts of people and entities: this country’s ex-president and his followers, energy and mining companies, financiers and fixers, purveyors of high-end properties and luxury goods, icons of highbrow culture in Russia and their promoters in the West.

Russia’s classical musicians and ballet dancers – who since tsarist times have rivaled vodka and caviar among the country’s most desired exports – must be dismayed by the international ostracizing of the conductor Valery Gergiev, one of Putin’s most high-profile supporters in the Russian cultural elite.

Their association dates back to the 1990s, when Gergiev was restoring the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg to world stature, with support from Putin, then a key apparatchik in the city government. After Putin rose to national power, Gergiev was there for him, again and again.

In 2008, when Russia carved South Ossetia out of Georgia, Gergiev, a son of Ossetians who spent much of his youth in the region, led a concert in tribute to dead secessionists. In 2012, he appeared in a television ad for Putin’s presidential campaign. A year later, he offered a clumsy rationale for homophobic legislation enacted by Putin. In 2014, he signed a letter by cultural figures calling for the Russian annexation of Crimea. In 2016, he led his Mariinsky Orchestra in a concert in the ruins of ancient Palmyra in Syria, celebrating the Russian forces fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad’s army.

Along the way, Gergiev’s Mariinsky Theatre was treated to a lavish expansion of its physical plant in St. Petersburg, establishment of satellite venues in Russia’s Far East, and employment of the company as a premier cultural representative of the Russian state. The conductor received a number of official awards, among them designation as a “hero of labor” – fitting, as he’s certainly gotten his hands dirty.

On the Putinesque scale of friendship-with-benefits, Gergiev qualifies at least as an honorary oligarch. Now, he’s one of the first of Putin’s favorites to take a serious hit from Western sanctions.

The Vienna Philharmonic, which has engaged Gergiev regularly as a guest conductor, dropped him from tour performances in New York and Florida. (Also disinvited from the concerts was pianist Denis Matsuev, another Russian artist in the Putin orbit.) Carnegie Hall in New York has canceled concerts by Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra that had been scheduled in the spring. Gergiev has been dismissed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. His German talent agent has bailed on him. La Scala in Milan, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, the Riga Jurmala Festival in Latvia, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus and the Edinburgh Festival are severing their relationships with Gergiev for his failure to denounce the invasion.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to speak out. Crossing Putin could cost him his Mariinsky empire. His silence may end his career outside Russia – except, perhaps, in China and a few Putin-friendly cultural backwaters. (That might be enough to keep him fully employed. China has become a lucrative destination for classical musicians.)

While Gergiev stays silent, some of his compatriots are struggling to thread the needle between patriotism and decency. Anna Netrebko, the star soprano (and the most famous Mariinsky alumna), came out against the Ukraine invasion, but added, “[F]orcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right. . . . I am not a political person.” She subsequently canceled all her performances in the near future.

Netrebko’s statement might be a template for other semi-disclaimers to come from prominent Russian artists who aren’t ready to leave the country or to become non-persons at home.

How should the civilized world deal with cultural figures from rogue states? It’s a question we keep having to ask.

After World War II, the victorious powers and their cultural establishments assessed the culpability of artists who worked in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and under collaborationist regimes in occupied countries. During the Cold War, suspicions abounded about officially favored artists from the Soviet Union and its satellites in Central and Eastern Europe. In recent years, we’ve wondered how to treat artists who are on good terms with China’s authoritarian regime.

Viewing artists through a political lens may be unfair: Most are either disinterested or naïve when it comes to politics, and few cultural figures exert any meaningful political influence on dictators.

The moral view is less cloudy: Actively promoting a repressive or warmongering regime ought to disqualify an artist – or anyone else – from participating in civilized cultural discourse.

Historically, though, drawing the line has been a selective exercise. Nearly 80 years after the destruction of the Nazi regime, and more than 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the cultural figures who benefitted from the dictators’ favor have been dead long enough for their unsavory links to be overlooked or explained away. The rehabilitation of some of them began when the ink had barely dried on their party cards.

It’s too soon to even guess how long artists associated with Putin will be shunned in free societies. Some who’ve taken their leave from Gergiev seem to be hedging their bets – his now-former talent agent called him “one of the greatest conductors of all time” and “a visionary artist.” Considering the musical establishment’s years-long willingness to overlook Gergiev’s ties to the dictator, no one should be surprised to see him restored to classical music’s first tier when the smoke clears and the bodies are buried.

The apolitical and the amoral all too often go hand in hand.