It is one of my very earliest concert memories. In October 1965, my father drove us to Manchester to hear Mstislav Rostropovich play in the Free Trade Hall. Rostropovich played Dvořák’s cello concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic, who began the concert with a symphony by Tikhon Khrennikov and ended it with one by Brahms. I was smitten by Rostropovich’s noble playing. I had never heard a musician like him before.
This was, though, a concert taking place slap-bang in the middle of the cold war. The Cuban missile crisis had taken place less than three years earlier. The Berlin Wall was still fairly new. The Vietnam war was deepening. That summer I had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The movie version of Le Carré’s novel, with Richard Burton, was due out by the year’s end.
So a concert visit by a Soviet orchestra, opening their programme with a piece by a notorious Soviet cultural apparatchik, and featuring a superstar cellist whose oppositional support for human rights was at that stage not widely known, certainly not by me, but whose biography casually mentioned his award of a Stalin prize, was a freighted event. It could have been depicted as a visit from the enemy, and certainly as a political act as well as an artistic one.
Be clear that politics were undoubtedly involved. The Soviet Union would have weighed the risk of triggering another high-profile defection – it was only four years since Rudolf Nureyev’s sensational escape to the west – but must have judged the visit nevertheless as a worthwhile expression of what we now call soft power. Before issuing visas the UK authorities would certainly have thought about all these implications, too.
And so will many in the audience before buying tickets. My communist father, for example, was a great music lover, and we had Rostropovich’s recording of the Dvořák concerto at home on LP. But I am sure he bought tickets at least in part to show support for Soviet visitors, and because he wanted to help promote detente between Britain and the Soviet Union.
Yet as far as I recall it, there were no protests outside or inside the Free Trade Hall. Maybe I missed them or have forgotten them. If so, I apologise. But their absence will not surprise those who lived through these years. The 1960s were years of an almost total standoff with Russia and all the iron curtain countries in most respects. Travel in either direction was off limits to ordinary people on either side of the divide. But cultural links always existed.
In spite of the occasional defection, there were regular visits by Soviet musicians and dancers – and even tours by the Red Army Ensemble – throughout the cold war years. Among the Soviet artists who gave regular concerts in the west were Sviatoslav Richter, David and Igor Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Rostropovich. Among the westerners who triumphed in Moscow were Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould and our own John Ogdon. And while a London recital by Richter or Oistrakh could be wholly free of political resonance, a visit by Dmitri Shostakovich, sitting in the Soviet ambassador’s box at the Royal Festival Hall for the UK premiere of his 15th Symphony, which I witnessed in 1972, was far more officially charged. Yet do I regret hearing any of them? Not at all.
How times have changed. Last week, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Prom was held up by pro-Palestinian protests in the Albert Hall. Next week the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko is due to sing the title role in a new Covent Garden production of Puccini’s Tosca. The prospect of protests is very real there, too.
Netrebko rose to artistic greatness in the early years of Putin’s Russia, where she was the star soprano of Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky Opera in St Petersburg, and she was much feted, including by Putin. Nevertheless, within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine three and a half years ago, Netrebko put out a statement of condemnation, the very opposite of Gergiev. She even used the word “war” which is officially taboo in Russia. She has not returned to Russia from her home in Austria since the invasion.
Yet Netrebko’s participation in the Tosca production has rekindled a debate about whether she should be taking part at all and whether the Royal Opera House was right to hire her. It seems likely that Netrebko’s appearance will continue to be a news story, a source of public debate and of social-media furore. Demonstrations outside Covent Garden are certainly planned, and it is regrettably not out of the question that protests inside the house will occur, too.
Very obviously, we live in extremely different times in 2025 from those of 1965 when Rostropovich came to Manchester. Some of the issues, though, have powerful echoes. No one seriously argues that the arts can or should be a politics-free zone. The arts and politics are bound to mix to a degree, just as sport and politics are also bound to. A concert tour by a Soviet orchestra during the cold war was inescapably political. But it was also right that it took place, and was allowed to proceed. It undoubtedly did some good. We should also never forget that not all Russians were or are supporters of Stalin or Putin, just as not all white South Africans were supporters of apartheid and not all Israelis are supporters of Netanyahu.
Neither the Royal Opera House nor Netrebko has, however, shown the pragmatic sensitivity that today’s complicated dispute demands. In some people’s view, Covent Garden’s hiring of a Russian soprano when her country is killing Ukrainians is completely unacceptable. But that has to be weighed against the fact that Netrebko has opposed, not supported the invasion, and that, in any event, she is a great artist and not a politician.
The arts and politics are not the same thing. The arts have meaning far beyond politics. Boycotts are a dangerous denial of that truth. Save in very exceptional circumstances, such as when we are at war as a nation, we risk demeaning what ultimately we stand for if we refuse to allow an artist their freedom to express themselves. Denying an artist like Netrebko her voice – and what a voice it is – because of her nationality, her ethnicity, or her views, real or supposed, is a course that we take not just at her peril, but at our own.