The fate of the Archer review into Arts Council England (ACE) has been unclear for some time. After a government review of ACE was announced in March—led by Mary Archer, a former chair of the Science Museum Group—the public review was paused before the general election in July. After an email from a Labour government […]

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“Fortune is like a bird in a wood. If we know how to whistle to her she will come to us.” —from pianist Ashley Wass’s biography on X, unattributed  I: The Amateur   About two years ago, a renowned European musician received a call from his agency with an offer for an unusual gig. A Dubai […]

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Nearly three years ago, Maria Kalesnikava, the Belarusian flutist, curator, politician, and icon of the resistance against the Lukaschenko regime, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for alleged “conspiracy with the intent of illegal power seizure” and “founding and leadership of an extremist organization,” in a case widely considered to be politically motivated. In […]

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The pianist Pavel Kushnir died on July 27 at the age of 39 in a prison in Birobidzhan, Russian Federation, apparently of complications from a days-long dry hunger strike. In late May, Kushnir was arrested by FSB officers on charges of incitement to terrorism. On his YouTube channel, Kushnir, under the username Inoagent Mulder—he was […]

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On July 11, a public inquiry in the UK heard that the funeral of Cornelius Cardew, and a memorial event held in his memory, were both attended by an undercover police officer deployed by a specialist police unit to infiltrate revolutionary communist groups. Though it was conveyed to him through a manager at the Special […]

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No, I didn’t attend any of the 11 concerts—four orchestral and seven chamber music—given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during its residency in Shanghai at the end of June. Dubbed the orchestra’s “first residency” in China by the press and the China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF) which hosted the orchestra, around 135 musicians and […]

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Recently, Russian media reported on plans by the state-owned VTB Bank to build a new concert hall and performing arts complex for conductor Teodor Currentzis and his musicAeterna ensembles at the Novo-Admiralteysky shipyard in St. Petersburg.  On June 7, VTB President and Chairman Andrey Kostin and Governor Alexander Beglov signed a statement of intent formalizing […]

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For weeks, Kharkiv and the surrounding region has been under regular bombardment, but May 23, the day I arrived in the city, was an especially tragic occasion for our festival, KharkivMusicFest.  My train ride to Kharkiv from Chełm, southeast Poland, took almost 24 hours. The cars were crowded with passengers. In my compartment was a […]

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In October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never came out. A journalist for The Washington Post and Middle East Eye who was fiercely critical of his country’s regime, Khashoggi was ambushed by a 15-man Saudi hit team; he was suffocated to death and his body was dismembered with a bone […]

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“Everybody’s so angry right now that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” Salman Rushdie said earlier this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. “And what’s more, we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something.… And if you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each […]

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