By Alvise Armellini
ROME (Reuters) -The wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is urging Italy to cancel a concert by a Russian conductor who has been shunned in the West since the invasion of Ukraine.
Valery Gergiev is scheduled to perform on July 27 at a festival in the Reggia di Caserta palace near Naples, leading a local philharmonic orchestra and soloists from the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in St Petersburg, which he leads.
“There is a big problem” with the festival, Yulia Navalnaya wrote in an op-ed for Tuesday’s la Repubblica newspaper, calling Gergiev an “intimate friend” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a cultural ambassador for his administration.
“How is it possible that in the summer of 2025, three years after the start of the conflict in Ukraine, Valery Gergiev, Putin’s accomplice (…) is suddenly invited to Italy to participate in a festival,” wrote Navalnaya, whose husband died suddenly in 2024 in an Arctic penal colony at the age of 47.
Gergiev did not immediately comment on her remarks.
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.
The head of the Campania region, which is organising the festival, said Gergiev had been invited to keep “channels of communication open even with those who do not think like us.”
In this spirit, the festival had also invited Israeli conductor Daniel Oren, regional president and centre-left politician Vincenzo De Luca, a critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, wrote on Facebook.
“We are not asking these men of culture to answer for the political choices of the leaders of their respective countries,” he said.
Italy’s right-wing government has supported Ukraine and international sanctions against Moscow. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office and the Ministry of Culture declined comment on Gergiev’s invitation.
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.
Navalny had denied the charges against him, including fraud and extremism, saying they were trumped up to silence him.
Gergiev, 72, was made director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 2023, despite being banished from Western concert halls.
(Additional reporting by Angelo Amante, editing by Keith Weir)
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