From The Times, Jessica Duchen
On the night that Russia invaded Ukraine, Semyon Bychkov was in Prague, conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra there in Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass. Afterwards, he couldn’t sleep. Experts were saying that the build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border was a bluff, but Bychkov — who was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) — was certain an invasion was imminent.
“At 3am I looked at my phone and saw the attack had happened,” he says. “I sat down to write something that had been in my mind the preceding days.”
His page-long condemnation concluded: “There are moments in life when silence in the face of evil becomes its accomplice and ends up becoming its equal. To remain silent today is to betray our conscience and our values, and ultimately what defines the nobility of human nature.” Days later, on February 27, he gave an address during a giant demonstration in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, where Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring in 1968.
Bychkov, 69, says the stakes are too high to leave politics to the politicians. “This is not a question of politics. It’s a question of life and death.”
The invasion sparked considerable controversy in the musical world over whether to cancel Russian compositions and performers. In Cardiff an amateur orchestra dropped Tchaikovsky’s martial 1812 Overture. At Polish National Opera, Warsaw, Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov (premiered in 1874) was cut — to Bychkov, a bizarre decision. “That opera is about one man’s absolute power and the heavy personal price that he pays for it,” he says. “They should perform it ten times a day!
“Under bombardment, of course the Ukrainians don’t want Russian art, music or literature. I grew up with the music of Shostakovich, who was God for me, but when I emigrated to America, for three years I couldn’t listen to a note of Shostakovich, because it brought me back to what I had left. Music is great art that comes from life, and if that kind of life hurts you so much, you reject its art. But why Russian music would be cancelled in the West, this I cannot understand.”
The matter of Russian performers is less straightforward. “Judging someone purely by their nationality is wrong,” Bychkov says, “but if artists are identified with the regime and are publicly on record defending its actions, which are indefensible, we have every right to boycott them. Nevertheless, the situation is extremely complicated.
“If you’re an artist in Russia with a certain prominence, you have to make choices. You could conform, then you will be rewarded and you will not have enough pockets to stuff your medals in. You could remain silent — but a lot of pressure is put on those in positions of responsibility to decide: are you going to object to this war or support it? You remember that your family might also suffer, not just you. The next choice is to remain silent, in ‘internal exile’, but this contained pain destroys you from inside. Or you could leave the country. Not everyone can and not everybody wants to. We have to recognise that.” …
Born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad in 1952, Bychkov remembers the ideological aspects of Soviet life as stifling. “There was a divide between reality and political dogma, and I became aware of that very early,” he says. His father, a scientist, was subjected to official antisemitism. “His suffering touched me deeply, psychologically. That precipitated my desire to leave.” Eventually he emigrated to the US via Vienna, aged 22.
Today he is known for his warmth, wisdom and wit. He leads rehearsals with a just-discernible Russian accent and seems to treat his musicians as colleagues, not (as some conductors do) servants. He built his career in the US through the 1980s, and from 1989 in Europe — Paris, Dresden, Florence and Cologne, among other places — eventually settling in France with his wife, Marielle Labèque (she and her sibling, Katia, are the celebrated Labèque sisters piano duo). In London, the Royal Academy of Music, where he holds the Otto Klemperer chair of conducting, has recently awarded him an honorary doctorate.
In August his Prom with the BBC Symphony Orchestra culminates with the Symphonic Dances by Sergei Rachmaninov, who arguably represents the ultimate in musical exile, having written little music for 20 years after fleeing the 1917 Russian revolution. Bychkov has an unorthodox theory as to why. “The Russians have always said that Rachmaninov couldn’t compose outside Russia. That makes them feel so good!” he says. He is only half joking. “I believe that this is not the reason at all.
“First, having lost everything, Rachmaninov had to earn his living as a pianist, but also, how do you continue to compose in the musical language of late romanticism after Stravinsky has written The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg has invented 12-tone music? How do you find your place beside something that has turned the world on its head? I think it took him 20 years to figure it out.”
When does he believe the war in Ukraine will end? “When there are no more tears to cry,” he says. “When there is no more to destroy. It may happen sooner than some expected, but too late to alleviate the pain. What is clear is that Ukraine has already won by refusing to collapse, even before the real help started arriving.