What Did You Do in the War, Dad?

I won the war against Russian fascism last night, going to my first concert since 2019: brother-in-law's brother-in-law had tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and couldn't go, so he passed them to me, and I was feeling kind of funny about going, because the conductor was Valery Gergiev, longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he became friends with the then deputy mayor, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in 1992, which has been pretty good for his career (he's been the third wealthiest Russian on the Forbes list of celebrities), but it hasn't been so good for his reputation internationally when he's appeared in Putin's campaign ads, denounced the members of the Pussy Riot group, or failed to address the Russian "gay propaganda" law of 2013 making it a crime to distribute "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships", which has led to protests when he appears in New York, one of which I witnessed a while back (I felt like I was crossing a picket line), as well as dark questions about the relationship between art and power, as Alex Ross (whose account I am shamelessly stealing from here) told New Yorker readers in reference to a 2013 Gergiev performance of Dmitry Shostakovich's 8th symphony:

We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his terror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a conductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypocritical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense.

Anyway, in the end, I got to go to the concert and Gergiev didn't get to conduct it. I should have known—it was reported in The Times on Thursday: Gergiev is canceled. 

Vienna dumped him for the orchestra's current US tour, he's losing gigs in Milan and perhaps Munich and Rotterdam, and last night he was replaced by the genial Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, while the very young Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho stepped in for the Russian Denis Matsuev (who has expressed support for the annexation of Crimea). It was a kind of schlocky program but one that goes beautifully with the famous warmth and richness of the Vienna band and the Carnegie acoustics, of the two most warhorsy of Rachmaninov's warhorses, the second piano concerto and second symphony, and it worked really really well.

It also started really late, I guess because we had to enter in single file in a line stretching almost around the block as everybody's vaccination status was verified, and it wasn't surprising at the end when Nézet-Séguin turned to the audience and said, "You want an encore? Come back tomorrow night!" It was a giddy, funny moment, and it honestly did feel like a feeling of victory for Ukraine, leaving us tired and a little punch-drunk but happy, as if we actually had been at a well-fought battle, against the grim forces trying to overwhelm us in this dark time.