A concert by Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has been cancelled, which was announced by the Italian organisers on Monday. Protests were followed against giving the stage to the conductor who has been largely barred from European venues for failing to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Valery had been invited to conduct during a summer festival at the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples next Sunday. The regional governor, Vincenzo de Luca, had defended the invitation, saying, “The logic of preclusion … does not help peace.” The invitation had been widely criticised by human rights activists, Russian opposition figures and European parliamentarians.
Valery, who is 72, is the head of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Russian state theatres, and is considered close to President Vladimir Putin. He has been the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg since 1988 and in December 2023 also became artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, where he replaced general director Vladimir Urin, who signed a petition against the war.
Valery’s scheduled appearance, which would have marked his first in Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, had the strong backing of Vincenzo De Luca, the left-wing president of Italy’s Campania region
The concert triggered a dispute between Vincenzo De Luca and Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, who cautioned that the event could convey the wrong message. “Art is free and must not be censored,” Alessandro told. “But propaganda even when skillfully executed is another matter entirely.”
The event’s cancellation was celebrated by critics, with Pina Picierno, who is the vice-president of the European parliament and among the signatories of the letter, writing on social media: “We explained, we fought and we won!”
Milan’s La Scala was the first theater in the West to cut off relations with Valery, who was engaged at the theater when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after he failed to respond to Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala’s appeal to speak out against the war. Valery was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic in March 2022.
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