\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s often suggested, from different quarters, that Western classical music is losing a certain cultural salience, that it no longer connects to society at large in the ways it has in its prior history. This is of course not necessarily to say that classical music concerts are now less well attended, or attended with less enthusiasm. Audiences are still as engaged and vitally moved by classical music as they\u2019re possible to be \u2014 such, at least, is the impression gained by a lifetime of classical music appreciation. But the cultural meaning of the music to which classical music audiences respond has almost certainly shifted in its larger signifying role and context. It still means something purely as music<\/em>, but it doesn\u2019t usually speak to the world, as a normative or political entity, in the ways it may once have done.<\/p>\n There have even been voices from inside the classical music world, as outside it, recommending discontinuing certain performance traditions. The celebrated German baritone Matthias Goerne, recently on tour in Australia with the great Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, has suggested that some of the canonical operatic repertoire no longer speaks to the preoccupations of contemporary people<\/a>, and should be retired. This is not just a question of historical changes of taste, which are more or less arbitrary, but of a deeper question around value \u2014 of whether some kinds of music, by virtue of their intrinsic qualities as well as their wider cultural positioning, are more valuable or meaningful than other kinds. Philosophically, this question is usually framed around that of ontological realism: of whether some things in our experience \u2014 such as in the domains of art, or knowledge, or religion, among others \u2014 just are<\/em> of objectively more or less value, or whether we alone attribute such value, for other reasons, to them.<\/p>\n But there is an associated question, concerning whether or not there are more meaningful ways of framing the music we make, and present to the public, in particular social and political contexts. Music-making doesn\u2019t happen in a vacuum \u2014 it lives in and with the people who compose and perform, and then receive, it, in a real place and situation. Goerne and Trifonov\u2019s own final concert at Sydney\u2019s City Recital Hall, on March 30th<\/sup> this year, presented an opportunity to consider this at first hand.<\/p>\n Trifonov\u2019s solo recital for the first half of the programme had originally been advertised, weeks before, as Schubert\u2019s last piano sonata (no 21, D960) \u2014 a central, and profound, masterpiece of the piano repertoire. Well after tickets had gone on sale (I\u2019d bought one myself) Trifonov decided to drop the Schubert for a lesser-known, comparatively slight work \u2014 Tchaikovsky\u2019s Children\u2019s Album<\/em>, op 39. Why Trifonov decided for this change, at a relatively late moment, is uncertain, but it had political connotations, even if unintended. It\u2019s well known that some Australian, and international, audiences have been willing to boycott or even ban Russian musicians and performers more generally since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including Trifonov himself<\/a>, that year, in Montreal and Kansas, among other places. He had been perceived by different critics as not being sufficiently vocal in his denunciation<\/a> of the Russian invasion. I won\u2019t elaborate here on the moral value of these bluntly coercive kinds of intervention, but it remains the prerogative of audiences to decide how they choose to support or dis-endorse any given artist, or what that artist, ostensibly, represents.<\/p>\n But Trifonov\u2019s decisions for his Australian concerts were telling \u2014 and the context is important. His performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the night before the City Recital Hall concert, had him playing an exclusively Russian repertoire (including the brief encore), in addition to the orchestra opening the concert with a rarely heard piece by the nineteenth-century Russian composer Lyadov. In Melbourne, Trifonov also performed, as a soloist, an all-Russian repertoire. There seems to be a fairly clear, if innocuous, will behind these programming choices to highlight a Russian and, within that domain, very conventional, repertoire: Rachmaninov, Lyadov, Tchaikovsky. Possibly Trifonov\u2019s choices (and those of executive orchestral bodies) were on this occasion ingenuous: he simply wanted to play some beautiful, very accessible, even sentimentally childlike, music from his Russian homeland.<\/p>\n In the current context, however, this can be seen as na\u00efve at best, provocative at worst. Watching Trifonov perform the Tchaikovsky work \u2014 the evocations of tolling bells, of grave Slavonic choruses and their modal harmonies, of the depths of the often-celebrated Russian soul \u2014 we were treated to a version of \u201cpure music-making\u201d, where the music can ostensibly speak, and exist, for itself, in a near-sacred, if secular, space of pure aesthetic artistry, divorced from the vagaries of the world outside \u2014 somewhere beyond the doors of the recital hall.<\/p>\n But unfortunately, this kind of artistic purism, if it was intended, is not altogether possible. As Trifonov superbly inhabited the purely musical voice of old Russia \u2014 the Russia from before the 1917 revolution, before Lenin and Stalin, before Yeltsin and perestroika<\/em> and now Putin and the Ukrainian invasion \u2014 I had an impression of the immense pathos of the artistic undertaking on offer. The performance, exquisitely attentive to Tchaikovsky\u2019s evocations of childhood, of the flat wintry expanse of the Russian taiga, however beautiful, could not have been more artistically pathetic: I could only think of the hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians on the battlefields of the Ukrainian plains. Perhaps even that registration of pathos was, at least implicitly, at the back of Trifonov\u2019s intentions: Tchaikovsky\u2019s evocations of antediluvian innocence could somehow show up how far we had all gone wrong, in our modern world. But that would be a charitable reading. There was certainly in Trifonov\u2019s execution a musical perfection. But what it signified, beyond that, was a kind of vacancy that missed a deeper opportunity \u2014 one that often lies at the heart of the classical music enterprise.<\/p>\n This is because, quite simply, we understand the old Russia of artistic tradition, the one to which Trifonov remains faithful and asserts in his programming choices, as representing, in 2025, a lethal aggressor. It was Russia that invaded its sovereign neighbour in 2022, that has made forty-five thousand casualties of Ukrainian civilians<\/a>, including thirteen-thousand dead.\u00a0 More than two years ago up to five-hundred of these were children, and that number has only increased since then. Tchaikovsky\u2019s children\u2019s pieces were pathetic, in that association, in the extreme.<\/p>\n We cannot be expected to overlook this clear and present fact in the sepia-toned ahistoricism of music, suspended in a bottle of aesthetic timelessness, or \u2014 still more \u2014 ontological separation from the context of its performance. It\u2019s crucial here to recognise that no-one believes that Tchaikovsky or any other great Russian art of the past has anything to do with Putin\u2019s Russia, let alone being somehow symbolically culpable for its military invasion: that would also be historically absurd. It is simply that cultural representation has become highly loaded as a result of the war \u2014 something that Trifonov well knows as a contemporary Russian and a prominent proponent of Russian culture.<\/p>\n As I listened to Trifonov\u2019s flawless performance, I thought of another Russia to which he might well have given voice, and remained faithful \u2014 thereby explicitly sustaining a profundity commensurate with the aesthetic beauty of his performance. I thought of the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of great Russian artists and musicians who perished under the various phases of Russian autocracy and totalitarianism \u2014 and of those who barely subsist today in Putin\u2019s authoritarian regime. I thought of the artistically demanding works of Soviet and post-Soviet composers, such as Sofia Gubaidulina, who died just two weeks before Trifonov\u2019s Sydney performance, at the age of ninety-three, having lived through the post-Stalinist \u201crehabilitation\u201d of neglected and culturally persecuted artists. In 1973, Gubaidulina was attacked and almost strangled in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow; her friends came to believe that her attacker was a KGB agent.<\/p>\n