For weeks, Kharkiv and the surrounding region has been under regular bombardment, but May 23, the day I arrived in the city, was an especially tragic occasion for our festival, KharkivMusicFest. My train ride to Kharkiv from Chełm, southeast Poland, took almost 24 hours. The cars were crowded with passengers. In my compartment was a […]
Tag: Music & Politics
Posted inInterview
Built on Sand
In October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never came out. A journalist for The Washington Post and Middle East Eye who was fiercely critical of his country’s regime, Khashoggi was ambushed by a 15-man Saudi hit team; he was suffocated to death and his body was dismembered with a bone […]
Posted inOpinion
John McWhorter Has Nothing to Say (And He’s Saying It)
“Everybody’s so angry right now that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” Salman Rushdie said earlier this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. “And what’s more, we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something.… And if you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each […]
Posted inInterview
“All They Have is Their Culture”
The total population of Estonia is just 1.3 million, but the diversity of its cultural scene belies the country’s small size. Estonian classical music alone boasts the renowned Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, several opera ensembles, an active choral scene, and groups specialized in early and contemporary music. Composers have often taken on roles as public […]
Posted inInterview
Blood and Milk
In 2019, Janvier Murenzi wrote “Mata y’ amaraso,” a composition to commemorate the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. Murenzi lives in Huye, in the south of the country. The 62-year-old is a lecturer at the University of Rwanda, where he teaches courses in social thought, philosophy, and political thought. He is also a music […]
Posted inInterview
In Defense
Any day now, Stas Nevmerzhytskyi, the editor-in-chief of The Claquers, an independent Ukrainian online classical music magazine, will join the Armed Forces of Ukraine. A musicologist specializing in early music by training—“I graduated from the National Music Academy in Kyiv, which, unfortunately, still bears the name of Tchaikovsky,” he said—Nevmerzhytskyi founded the publication, with articles […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Maurizio Pollini Playlist
The 2014 EuroArts documentary portrait of Maurizio Pollini, “De main de maître,” opens with a literal portrait: that of the pianist’s great-uncle. The interviewer mistakes the painting for Pollini himself. Pollini recounts the life of his forbear: “He ran away from home when he was 16, in 1800, joined Garibaldi’s army, and took part in […]
Posted inEssay
Music, Putin’s “Powerful Weapon”
In January, late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny reported that the Siberian penal colony in which he was held blasted the song “Я РУССКИЙ” (“I Am Russian”) by Putin’s favorite singer, Shaman, every day at 5 a.m., right after the national anthem. But the dictator has also instrumentalized classical music for his own purposes. A […]
Posted inReview
29,313; or, where the archive ends
I. I had come to Munich searching for an archive I wasn’t sure was there. This was several years ago now, back when I was still fumbling toward a book on post-war opera—something about its relation to genre, history, and mourning; the sketches are still tucked in a drawer somewhere—and at the time, Munich was […]
Posted inReview
Turn The Machine Inward
The Met Opera’s new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” stars trucks. Or rather tractor trailers, ready to move goods. In the first act, which the libretto sets in a Seville cigarette factory, workers crowd around a loading dock, loading boxes into a trailer whose destination is unknown. In the second act, Carmen and her smuggler gang […]