A planned classical music concert in Italy, featuring a Russian conductor known to be an old friend and vocal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is sparking furor after the wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny urged Italian authorities to cancel it.
Star conductor Valery Gergiev is booked to perform with members of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Orchestra on July 27 at the Reggia di Caserta palace, near Naples, as part of the Un’Estate da RE festival. The concert would mark Gergiev’s first performance in the West since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Navalny’s wife Yulia Navalnaya, in an op-ed published on Tuesday by La Repubblica newspaper, said “there is a big problem with the festival,” urging organizers to cancel the event and calling Gergiev a “conscious and active accomplice of Putin’s regime.”
Alexei Navalny, who was Putin’s fiercest opponent, died in 2023 in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle. His supporters have accused the Kremlin of killing him, though Russian authorities deny this.
Gergiev, 72, could not be immediately reached for comment.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gergiev was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and was forced to cancel engagements at La Scala in Italy as well as Carnegie Hall and other venues in the U.S. He has not performed in the West since. Gergiev has instead led several tours with the Mariinsky Orchestra in China since the invasion.
Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, has issued a statement expressing concern about the Gergiev-conducted concert, but has stopped short of asking organizers to cancel it.
The right-wing minister said the concert could “turn a high-level but objectively controversial and divisive musical event into a sounding board for Russian propaganda.” But Giuli added that regional authority of the Southern Italian region of Campania, which organized and paid for the Un’Estate da RE festival, is free to choose what events they can host.
Meanwhile, the center-left governor of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca, has rejected calls to cancel the concert, telling Italian reporters that blocking cultural exchanges “does not help peace, but only serves to fuel the rivers of hatred.”
Gergiev has supported Putin on many occasions, including appearing in a TV ad for his 2012 presidential campaign, signing a petition supporting the 2014 annexation of Crimea and conducting a patriotic concert in the Syrian city of Palmyra in 2016, shortly after Russian airstrikes there.
