Herman Hesse has a character trying listening to a Bach c ello solo on a static-filled radio. A companion complains of the static. The character object: "It is a perfect reflection of the human condition."
Keep Hesse in mins as you listen to this beautiful violin solo.
The Times article below, about the same concert, is also filled with static of Russian misdeeds, likely true and irrelevant to the concert: References to the PanamaPapers adorn the story and have nothing to do with the Russian gesture which I would like he United States to emulate.
PALMYRA, Syria — Russia has made its mark on Syria with the crash of bombs and the thud of artillery. On Thursday the Russians added gentler sounds: live classical music echoing through an ancient stone theater and into the eerie, empty desert.
Extending its soft power into the Syrian conflict, Russia deployed a symphony orchestra led by one of its best-known conductors, Valery Gergiev, and the cellist Sergei P. Roldugin, an old and — according to the Panama Papers documents leaked last month — very wealthy friend of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Their performance space was Palmyra, the city of ruins left by Roman and other ancient civilizations and ruined furtherby the depredations of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
The orchestra played pieces by Johan Sebastian Bach and two Russian composers, Sergei Prokofiev and Rodion Shchedrin, in a second-century Roman amphitheater, the set for a 2015 film produced by the Islamic State that featured the execution of 25 people.
The contrast was intended to underscore what Russia sees as its underappreciated role in helping Syrian forces liberate Palmyra from zealots and fighting on the side of civilization against barbarism.
The Russians were so eager to make that point that they flew a group of reporters from Moscow to Syria and then bused them to Palmyra to see the performance. The production, attended by a heavily guarded V.I.P. guest list, was broadcast live on Russian state television.
Viewers in Russia saw the concert spliced with videos of Islamic State atrocities, part of a domestic political operation intended to mobilize pride in Russia’s military role abroad, at a time when the economy at home is mired in the second year of a deep recession.
Mr. Putin thanked the musicians by video link from his vacation home on the Black Sea.
He said the performance signaled “hope for Palmyra’s revival as the heritage of the whole humanity, but also as hope that our contemporary civilization will be relieved from this horrible disease, international terrorism.”
The deployment of classical musicians in territory reconquered, with Russian help, by Syrian forces just two months ago reprised a performance conducted by Mr. Gergiev in August 2008 to celebrate Russia’s victory in a brief war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia over South Ossetia. That Georgian region, also with Moscow’s help, has declared itself an independent state, like the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Gergiev, the artistic and general director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and previously the principal conductor of the Munich and then London symphony orchestras, has long been an eager supporter of Russia’s direction under Mr. Putin. He joined other prominent cultural figures in signing an open letter in 2014 in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine.
Also taking part in the Palmyra spectacle, before an audience of Russian and Syrian soldiers, officials and dignitaries, was Mr. Putin’s friend, Mr. Roldugin, the cellist whose name surfaced last month in leaked papers from a Panama law firm that indicated he had $2 billion in offshore accounts.
Wearing a white cap and accompanied by the orchestra, he played “Quadrille” from “Not Only Love,” an opera by Shchedrin.
Mr. Putin has dismissed the so-called Panama Papers disclosures as a plot “to weaken us from within” and said that Mr. Roldugin had used the money attributed to offshore companies he controlled to import musical instruments.
The dignitaries attending the concert included several foreign ambassadors to Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency based in Paris, which has declared Palmyra a world heritage site.
Darko Tanaskovic, the ambassador from Serbia, said the gathering was a way for “international society” to give Syrians hope.
Shortly before the concert, the desert silence was broken by a thud from a Russian demining center near the ruins.
Russia has a history of turning to classical music for morale in conflict, using talented artists to display its cultural strengths. It did in August 1942 when, during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called, starving Russian musicians, supplemented by military performers, gave the city’s first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, otherwise known as the Leningrad Symphony.
The concert on Thursday, like Mr. Gergiev’s 2008 concert in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, involved much more than just music. While showcasing Russia’s musical richness, it was also a military mission, with guests bused in a heavily guarded convoy escorted by helicopter gunships. The route from Latakia, the site of Russia’s main military base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, led past Syrian military outposts, destroyed villages, clusters of burned vehicles and other reminders of the fierce fighting that had raged in an area held by the Islamic State from May 2015 until March this year.
The concert, performed by Mr. Gergiev’s Mariinsky Theater orchestra, was held just a week after Unesco experts had visited to assess the destruction inflicted by the militant group. They reported extensive damage to the city’s museum, where statues had been “defaced, smashed, their heads severed, the fragments left lying on the ground.” Also destroyed was an arch and the Temple of Baal Shamin, which the experts said had been “smashed to smithereens.”
Western governments have been reluctant to endorse Russia’s military role in Syria, which they have repeatedly portrayed as an effort to not merely uproot terrorism but to help Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, crush all opposition, including rebel groups supported by the West. Russia has also been accused of bombing hospitals, something Moscow denies, and propping up a brutal dictator.
Russia’s military first became directly involved in the Syrian conflict last September. Declaring the mission mostly accomplished, Mr. Putin in March ordered the withdrawal of the “main part” of Russian forces.
Yet at Russia’s base in Latakia this week there was no sign of any pullout at an airfield clogged with warplanes and helicopters. Su-24 fighter-bombers were taking off and landing regularly.
container offered a growing collection of Russian-language novels and other books. Sgt. Alexander Korenyev, the librarian, said it had 1,476 titles when he arrived three months ago and about 2,000 today. Many have military themes, like a tome titled “The Winged Heroes of Moscow.”
“The officers like history, the soldiers science fiction and the women in the canteen, well, you understand, like romances,” the librarian said.
The Russian military has also opened a rest center — called a “psychological unloading” in Russian — in a base tent. Oil paintings of a birch forest and a snowy landscape adorn the tent walls to help soldiers forget Syria.
As part of a push to persuade skeptics of its intervention, Russia has deployed teams of officers to promote reconciliation between the Syrian government and its opponents.
The Russians, like the American military in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, are diving into tangled local politics.
A day before the concert, the Russian military took reporters to Kaukab, a village east of Latakia, where local chiefs held what was described as a “reconciliation ceremony” with the Syrian government. The village, on a hill overlooking orchards and badly damaged by recent fighting, looked deserted at first, but when the buses carrying reporters arrived, a crowd of children appeared waving portraits of Mr. Assad.
The Russians said they had carried out 92 such ceremonies involving 52 armed groups.
As shadows lengthened in Palmyra after Thursday’s concert and dusk cooled the heat of the day, Mr. Roldugin, the cello maestro, said he had left his Stradivarius home.
“I wouldn’t bring such a cello to this climate, with the heat and the dust,” Mr. Roldugin said, portraying himself as a musician of modest means that seemingly belied his vast — at least on paper — offshore wealth. “It’s a rare instrument,” he said. “It costs a lot.”
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