The lives of even anti-Putin Russian artists are being made impossible

Swift and sure, the guillotine blade came down on Russians in the West on 24 February last year, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The logic was clear as concerned Putin loyalists; cutting them off from western gravy trains in the face of their dear leader’s grotesque aggression made some sense. They could bed down with the devil, so to speak, but not on our buck. So one doesn’t weep much over the relegation to Europe’s fringes of the likes of openly pro-Putin musicians such as pianist Denis Matsuev or the former LSO and Munich Philharmonic chief conductor Valery Gergiev.

Then there’s the soprano Anna Netrebko, who, seen as being close to Putin, was sacked immediately by the Met when she didn’t condemn the Russian President fast enough. She later condemned the war in no uncertain terms, but she’s still untouchable in Britain, according to Antonio Pappano, the music director of Covent Garden. In April, Pappano criticised the epidemic of ‘inept cancelling’ of Russian musicians triggered by the invasion, and defended his collaboration with Netrebko in Salzburg next year. But ‘the conditions are not right for her to be performing [in London]’.

Netrebko, who is widely liked, is unlikely to be permanently exiled, even though the Met suggested she might be. But the near-deletion from the classical music and dance world of Russians who don’t share Gergiev’s or Matsuev’s allegiance – or their richly roubled pockets – has obliterated, for the time being, the prospects of many young Russians, and reconfigured the artistic landscape and atmosphere of the industry, making it more Manichaean, more politicised.

To be clear: my violins will stay safely stowed for apologists of Putin, or those who profit from his regime.