Darcy James Argue, quite unwittingly, has tied together my two previous posts in an interesting and morally serious way: He asks why Dudamel is getting heat from some for not forcefully opposing Chávez, while Gergiev (whose work I just happened to praise unreservedly) gets a free pass on his close ties to, and explicit political support for, the odious Vladimir Putin.
This I did not know, and should have known, about Gergiev, and it’s very disturbing. Still, Stravinsky is Stravinsky, and I’ll continue to treasure the memory of what I heard last Friday. (I am on record condemning the Putin regime’s depradations, btw.)
As I wrote in DJA’s comments, there’s a difference here in that Sean Penn and other self-styled radicals are not flocking to Russia for photo-ops with Putin, whereas Chávez is being hailed as a hero by Penn and many other dunces on the American left. That’s why I and other liberals feel compelled to speak out against the Bolivarian windbag; the charge that we’re echoing the right is unfair and decontextualized.
None of this means that Dudamel, as an artist, is required to assume an outspoken political role in the matter. His work, like Gergiev’s, should be judged on musical criteria.
I recognize this can get dodgy. Along the way, DJA cites Steve Smith’s complaint that the topic of Chávez never came up during a pre-concert discussion at Carnegie. A similar thing happened last night at the Kimmel Center during an onstage chat with Jane Bunnett, a saxophone/flute specialist in Afro-Cuban jazz who has traveled extensively to Cuba to work with (and hire) Cuban musicians. Bunnett talked about how Cuba’s music conservatories are losing teachers, ostensibly because once they come to the U.S., they tend to stay, as travel restrictions make it unlikely that they’ll be able to visit again without major hassle. The elephant in the room, Fidel Castro, went unmentioned. Could it be that music teachers are leaving Cuba not because of meanie Uncle Sam, but because Cuba is a dictatorship? That possibility wasn’t explored.
Now, like Dudamel, Bunnett is not required to have a position on Castro and her art should be judged on its merits. But what was that Trotsky quote? “You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.”
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