By Alvise Armellini and Angelo Amante
ROME (Reuters) -A concert in Italy by a top Russian conductor shunned in the West since the invasion of Ukraine could send the wrong message, the Italian culture minister said on Tuesday, stopping short of asking organisers to cancel it.
Valery Gergiev – regarded as close to Russian President Vladimir Putin – is expected to lead a local orchestra and soloists from St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Orchestra on July 27 at the Reggia di Caserta palace near Naples.
The event has drawn protests from Italian politicians and international activists, including the wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who have all urged Italy to cancel it.
“There is a big problem” with the festival, Yulia Navalnaya wrote in an op-ed on Tuesday’s la Repubblica newspaper, calling Gergiev a “conscious and active accomplice of Putin’s regime”.
Gergiev, 72, did not immediately comment.
Italy’s Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said in a statement: “Art is free and cannot be censored. Propaganda, however, even if done with talent, is something else.”
The minister said that the concert could “turn a high-level but objectively controversial and divisive musical event into a sounding board for Russian propaganda”.
Giuli added that the centre-left regional authority of Campania, which organised and paid for the “Un’Estate da RE” festival, was free to choose which events to host.
The president of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca, rejected criticism, telling reporters that blocking cultural exchanges “does not help peace, but only serves to fuel the rivers of hatred”.
De Luca, a critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, said last week Gergiev had been invited, along with Israeli conductor Daniel Oren, to keep “channels of communication open even with those who do not think like us”.
Italy’s right-wing government has supported Ukraine and international sanctions against Moscow.
In 2022, several Western cultural institutions, including Milan’s La Scala, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and New York’s Carnegie Hall, severed ties with Gergiev over his failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A year after, he was made director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, despite being banished from many international concert halls.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation wrote last week to the Italian interior minister, urging him to deny entry to Gergiev, and to the culture minister and the director of the Reggia di Caserta asking them to cancel the concert.
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini and Angelo Amante; Additional reporting by Giulia Segreti; Editing by Keith Weir and Alex Richardson)
