As a young boy, I remember seeing a documentary with my father of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Beethoven's 9th for Adolf Hitler's birthday. It perhaps unfairly tempered my childish exuberant pleasure in listening to his Brahms 1st with the Berliner Phil. The Putin music mob survived the 2014 Crimea - Donbas outrage, with scarcely a ruffle, apart from a few plucky principled demonstrators in front of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. The band played on. Later, in my usual perch over the pit at the Met, I watched Maestro Valery Gergiev, unshaven and looking hung over, conduct an indifferent Dutchman. Politics aside, I felt, apart from the sweat, he oozed lazy entitlement. On FB, the usual absurdities arise - these are 'artists' somehow above politics, or even ordinary civic decencies. They must not be demeaned or cancelled by some crude bureaucracy inquiring where they stand. I will miss Anna Netrebko's Lady Macbeth, her fatuous 'anti-war' remarks and nouveau-rich fashions on instagram, less so. Alex Ross has done a good job of sorting it out. Meantime, where's Toscanini when you need him?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/valery-gergiev-and-the-nightmare-of-music-under-putin?fbclid=IwAR3yHrZxR4QCQEHpVDSkqlCskUiq7G3Ch6gUYhZjcSt3O-3GcKtIGnrZuSQ