Pablo Luna
The Carnegie Hall has canceled the scheduled performances of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev for openly supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and for remaining a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The three performances Gergiev was scheduled to lead at the Vienna Philharmonic have been nixed, The Post reports.
The Carnegie Hall canceled Gergiev’s performances as Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this week, killing scores of people and displacing millions of people in three Ukrainian cities. The Carnegie Hall also revoked two performances scheduled for Russia’s Mariinsky Orchestra in May and which would have been directed by Gergiev.
Gergiev’s agent in Munich, Markus Felsner, also denounced the maestro for his continued relationship with Putin and for failing to publicly denounce the invasion of Ukraine. Felsner said Gergiev remains the “greatest conductor alive” and that his “merits for the arts [are] unparalleled by virtually any living artist,” but that his political views are inconsistent with the values of open society and national sovereignty.
“Today, I have informed Maestro Valery Gergiev that he is no longer a client of Felsner Artists,” Felsner wrote. “In the light of the criminal war raged by the Russian regime against the democratic and independent nation of Ukraine, and against the European open society as a whole, it has become impossible for us, and clearly unwelcome, to defend the interests of Maestro Gergiev, one of the greatest conductors of all time, a visionary artist loved and admired by many of us, who will not, or cannot, publicly end his long-expressed support for a regime that has come to commit such crimes.”
With Gergiev’s silence since Russia invaded Ukraine, Teatro Alla Scala of Milan wrote to Gergiev to either speak against the war on Ukraine or be sacked from performing at Tchaikovsky’s scheduled “Queen of Spades”. Several activists have also called on the conductor to denounce the ongoing Russian war against its neighbor but Gergiev remains silent, even on the trove of cancelations slammed against him.
“When a government viciously attacks the order of peace on which our entire continent was rebuilt, a previously outspoken political supporter of that government, holding a government-supported office, cannot in my personal view, in a seemingly neutral way, appeal to ‘both sides’ for peace, or remain altogether silent; nor can those who serve him with love and devotion,” Felsner stated.
Apart from the sack by the Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic of Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the European Broadcasting Union, the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre in England, and London’s Royal Opera House among others have banned Gergiev and other Russian artists from performing.
