Musicians Sound Out for Russian Prisoners

New York Times

Members of the Kremerata Baltica string orchestra emerged on stage first, all dressed in black. Their leader, the violinist Gidon Kremer, took his place in front, wearing a white shirt and a long black vest, with his bespectacled profile to the audience, his knees slightly bent, looking like a forlorn fiddler.

They played something impossibly plaintive, a piece of music in which the sadness built interminably, it seemed. The orchestra took halting breaks followed by a note of even greater sadness. There would be no relief: The musicians seemed simply to stop at one point and take a bow.

“V & V,” for voice and violin, by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, where the taped voice belonged to a long-dead singer, was the opening piece in an unusual concert on Tuesday night that was organized in the geographical center of Europe, a few blocks from the European Court of Human Rights, to draw attention to the continuing struggle of two former oil magnates, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon A. Lebedev, and, organizers said, other Russian political prisoners.

Besides locals, the audience was a who’s who of the opposition to the Russian regime: the former prime minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov, recently denied the right to register his political party; the former chess champion-turned-politician Garry Kasparov, whose usual eight bodyguards were notably absent now that he was outside of Russia; former dissident Alex Goldfarb, who was signing copies of his book on the polonium murder of the former K.G.B. officer Alexander V. Litvinenko; Sergei Kolesnikov, a former ally of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin in his first public appearance after making striking revelations about the billion-dollar palace built by Mr. Putin; William F. Browder, a former international investor in Russia who is running a campaign to protest the prison death of his lawyer Sergei L. Magnitsky, who was long refused medical treatment; and many others.

The concert was the latest effort by a large group of lawyers, public relations professionals and human rights activists who for nearly eight years have been battering the wall of the Russian justice system.

Since their arrests in June and October 2003, respectively, Mr. Lebedev and Mr. Khodorkovsky have stood two trials and received combined sentences of nearly 14 years each. Amnesty International has recently recognized both men as “prisoners of conscience.”

Speaking before the concert, Sergei Kovalev, a former dissident and the elder statesman of Russian human rights activism, declared justice dead in Russia and “tyranny its only heir.”

The concert was several years in the making, beginning with a member of the Khodorkovsky team casting about for a new approach to the campaign and ending with an international team of noted musicians.

Mr. Kancheli was joined by the Estonian composer Arvo Part, who wrote a symphony dedicated to Mr. Khodorkovsky. The symphony was not performed at this concert — a shorter piece by Mr. Part was in the program — but it served to attract the violinist Gidon Kremer, who was born in Latvia, travels the world giving concerts and splits the rest of his time between the Baltics and other parts of Europe.

Next the group was joined by the Moscow-born pianist Evgeny Kissin, a born Muscovite who is now a British subject who makes his home in Paris. The cellist Mischa Maisky was born in Riga, studied in Leningrad and Moscow, served prison time outside the city of Gorky, and finally emigrated to Israel in the 1970s.

Other members of the team were the Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich, who teamed up with Mr. Kissin to play the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s variations on Paganini for two pianos, and with Mr. Kremer and Mr. Maisky for a Shostakovich piano trio; and the bass singer Anatoli Kotscherga and conductor Roman Kofman, both from Ukraine.

A private company stepped in to sell tickets and Vytautas Landsbergis, the former Lithuanian leader, now a member of the European Parliament, stepped in to facilitate the organization. Mr. Landsbergis, once a leader of the Lithuanian movement for independence from the Soviet Union, gave a withering speech criticizing Western powers, calling them slow to react to the Khodorkovsky case.

“When Solzhenitsyn called on people ‘not to live a lie,’ he was addressing the Russian people,” he said. “Now his appeal would be addressed to the decaying and lying Western democracies.”

A former professor of the Vilnius conservatory, Mr. Landsbergis then played a short piece at the piano.

In a video address broadcast before the music, the historian Elie Wiesel said, “May it break the ice that surrounds the ice of the powerful in Moscow.”

It was Mr. Khodorkovsky’s mother who made the most poignant plea in her speech just before the concert. Marina Khodorkovskaya spoke in Russian, and her grandson, Pavel Khodorkovsky, who lives in New York, interpreted.

“If the names of Lebedev and Khodorkovsky are forgotten, they will suffer the fate of Magnitsky,” she said, referring to the lawyer who died in a Moscow prison aged 37. “You are saving their lives. Thank you.” unshaven girl hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php unshaven girls