SPECULUM VERUM
Close to Vladimir Putin, Russian conductor Valery Gergiev expelled from Royal Swedish Academy of Music due to war in Ukraine, we learned Thursday from the institution. “Through its close alliance with the Russian government which today is attacking Ukraine, we find it acts in a way that makes it impossible for us not to distance ourselves, and declare and l'AFP Susanna Ryden, president of the Academy. We consider this to be unacceptable and the Academy does not want to be associated with it.”
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Member since 2011, Valery Gergiev had an honorary position of foreign member within the prestigious Scandinavian institution. This is one of the ten Royal Swedish Academies in the same way as the one awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature..
The Russian conductor had already been declared persona non grata by several Western concert halls, from Germany where he had been fired from the direction of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, via France and Italy. A March, the Theater des Champs-Elysees in Paris had thus canceled the visit of the superstar. The same day, the Scala in Milan had also excluded Valery Gergiev from performances of an opera by Tchaikovsky, after his refusal to distance himself from Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, several institutions of the cultural world have started a series of deprogramming of Russian artists. In the world of classical music, la soprano superstar Anna Netrebko, criticized for its supposed complacency towards President Vladimir Putin, had also been shelved from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The 30 mars, she had expressly condemned the war against Ukraine, which had earned him this time being withdrawn from the poster in his own country. In their country, Russian artists have been asked to display their patriotism or, failing, to keep silent, and in western countries, to publicly distance themselves from the military operation and the Russian regime.
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