The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced the music world to reckon urgently with its naïveté towards the country’s imperial ambitions. Looking back, it remains shocking just how willing the field was to ignore, for instance, Valery Gergiev’s aggressive pro-Kremlin propaganda. The violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in contrast, was prophetically clearsighted, and willing to take action, too. In 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, she was one of the few prominent classical musicians to criticize Gergiev for his close relationship with Putin, refusing to perform under the conductor and in Russia. In 2022, she wrote on Facebook, “If we are not ready to prevent the invasion and war against Ukraine, we will reject all important values and principles the western society has been fighting for for over 100 years,” and played on the Ukrainian Independence Day on Maidan Square in Kyiv. A month before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, she warned that an attack was on the cards; she is involved with the pro-democracy movement in her home country of Georgia.
But the rules of the game have changed. Even accounting for all the erratic and sudden shifts in policy, the United States appears to have changed sides, supporting Russia’s foreign policy and heading for Russian-style autocracy. Two weeks ago, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff announced that he would not perform in Trump’s America, and cancelled an upcoming tour. Batiashvili, though, is still performing in New York and Washington at the end of April. I spoke with her on a video call before a concert she was giving in Valencia, Spain.
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