Every week, Bor Beekman, Robert van Gijssel, Merlijn Kerkhof, Anna van Leeuwen or Herien Wensink take a stand in the world of film, music, theater or visual arts.
And so classical music suddenly found itself at the center of the geopolitical battlefield. The attack on Ukraine had only just started when concert halls and opera houses in the West decided to break en masse with conductors and soloists who are a little too close to Vladimir Putin. Some institutions immediately banned all Russians – a piano competition in Dublin banned Russian participants, the Philharmonie in Haarlem canceled Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, composers who have been dead for some time (50 and 128 years).
The largest living fish among the canceled was Valery Gergiev, former conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and confidant of the Russian president. Gergiev saw almost all of his western performances evaporate – no longer his own festival in Rotterdam, no chefship in Munich. The busiest conductor in the world did not succumb to pressure to distance himself from Putin’s crimes. Now he must hope to be rewarded for his loyalty by directing the Bolshoi in Moscow, something Putin hinted at last week.
The issues surrounding Gergiev, who had a Dutch passport from his Rotterdam period, were quite numerous, but apparently not serious enough to say toededokie. He applauded the Russian occupation of South Ossetia in 2008, he whitewashed Russia’s anti-gay laws, he supported the annexation of Crimea, he lent himself with a flown-in orchestra to Russian propaganda among the ruins of Palmyra.
Until recently, his name was good for sold-out halls in the Netherlands, and we reviewed his concerts. We named the eccentric extra-musical affairs, there were even protests (violinist Lisa Batiashvili who played a pro-Ukrainian encore in 2014), but no one ever came to me calling for Gergiev’s performances to be ignored because of his political views or his bloodthirsty friend.
But when the Rotterdam Philharmonic announced its break with Gergiev, the reactions on social media showed an eruption of frustrations that had been dormant for years. Often the word ‘finally’ was used. Musicians who had played in the orchestra under Gergiev or who had soloed at his festival not so long ago also spoke out.
The Rotterdam Philharmonic has lost a specialist in the 20th-century Russian repertoire in particular, a master of tension building who works in a quasi-improvisational way, with whom you never knew what was going to happen. But the fact that the Gergiev Festival is now off the track may just be a stroke of luck. A festival in the honor and glory of one person had been difficult to sell to sponsors for some time, and certainly to the municipality of Rotterdam, which would stop the subsidy.
Will we ever see Gergiev again when the war is over? Not in the Netherlands, I think. But elsewhere in Europe? See Plácido Domingo, James Levine, Daniele Gatti: in classical music people are quite good at looking the other way when someone has gone wrong.