from this enlace a Twitter You can see a video that portrays well the time we live in: a Russian pianist performs in Moscow the music of a living Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov (kyiv, 1930); The police enter and try to interrupt the concert -in which the soprano Yana Ivanilova also participated-, talking to the musician and the public so that they will vacate the room. The pianist finishes playing the piece and the audience applauds him warmly.
This video, which almost all readers will know, went viral as a symbol of a Russian population that rejects the invasion of Ukraine. However, a few things catch our attention. The most striking is to observe a police (or whoever sent them) so up to date with the Ukrainian music produced in our time. It is not very normal for an official, far from music, to have this knowledge, although there is always the possibility that the heirs of the KGB -the FSB- are the ones who have informed. Even so, the professionalism in relation to the musical knowledge of the Russians is striking. Also curious is the attitude of the policemen who, far from violently cutting off the concert, let the pianist finish the piece. Something similar happened in the arrest of doctor Anastasia Vasilyeva, who had protested the arrest of opponent Navalni, and who received the police playing Beethoven on the piano. Here, too, the police waited until the end of the piece to take her away.
Nothing to do with all this with an old anecdote (we do not know if it is entirely true) that occurred in Spain in the 70s of the last century, when the fantastic symphony by Berlioz in a church or cathedral in a provincial capital. The director, in a virtuosic gesture of sound spatialization, decided that the famous oboe and English horn passage at the beginning of the third movement “Scène aux champs” be done in a special way. He placed the oboe offstage and, to give the English horn even more distance, he took it out of the church and into the street, so that his part would be heard even further away. The fact is that a couple from the Civil Guard passed by and, seeing a man in tails playing an instrument, wanted to stop him until the musician managed to make them understand the context.
A long time has passed since that incident and the general cultural level has risen somewhat, so we hope that today the Civil Guard, like the Russian police, already know who Berlioz is and his obsession. Perhaps it would be asking too much for it to recognize the music of one of the recently deceased Cristóbal Halffter or Luis de Pablo, although we do not rule it out.
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