He is now persona non grata for several Western concert halls
Conductor Valery Gergiev, who is close to Vladimir Putin, was expelled from the Royal Academy of Music in Sweden because of the war in Ukraine, AFP reported.
Valery Gergiev has been an honorary member of the Academy since 2011. It is one of the ten Swedish Royal Academies, along with the one that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Russian conductor has already been declared persona non grata by several Western concert halls, from Germany, where he was fired from the Munich Philharmonic, to France and Italy.
In March, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris canceled his performance. On the same day, the Milan Scala canceled performances of Valery Gergiev’s Tchaikovsky opera after he refused to distance himself from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several institutions in the world of culture have begun to refuse the participation of Russian artists. In the world of classical music, soprano Anna Netrebko was suspended from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. On March 30, she explicitly condemned the war against Ukraine, leading to her removal from the stage in her own country.
In their own country, Russian artists are expected to show patriotism or remain silent, and in Western countries to publicly distance themselves from the military operation and the Russian regime.
Source: BTA
