National IDENTITY
Conductor Kirill Karabits talks to Ken Walton about the importance of the I, Culture orchestra, tensions within his homeland, Ukraine, and Scotland’s referendum
You have people and you have politicians, and there is a huge difference between these two elements. They don’t function as one
I’M STARING at a headline in a newspaper: “Invasion alert as 20,000 Russian troops mass on Ukraine border.” Meanwhile, tomorrow at the Usher Hall, the Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits will conduct I, Culture, an orchestra made up of young musicians from Ukraine and other former Soviet states, in a performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, music that fiercely depicts the Siege of Leningrad by the German army in 1941.
Even back in May, when Karabits was in Edinburgh to conduct the concerto finals of the BBC Young Musician competition, and the Ukraine presidential election hadn’t quite taken place, the stinging irony of that juxtaposition was not lost on him. “But it’s a good irony,” he told me then. “Shostakovich was a humanist. He stood up against violence of all kinds, and he suffered from the system himself.”
Of course, that’s the conundrum that has tested Shostakovich scholars over decades: whether the composer was a sycophant to Stalinist artistic oppression and control, or whether his music spoke with a biting ironic tongue, mocking Stalin and his cultural apparatchiks in a way they might never have perceived – and even if they had, could never have proved.
Even with the Leningrad Symphony – its bloodcurdling “invasion” theme in the opening movement, driven by insistent mind-numbing repetition, painting so vivid a picture on the outside of a specific and gruelling wartime scene – there is evidence to suggest that Shostakovich had actually written much of the music prior to the siege, and in fact had other “enemies of humanity” in mind.
“It’s wrong to put labels on people,” says Karabits. “We say today he was a Russian composer, but Russia has different aspects, and it has always been like that. You have people and you have politicians, and there is a huge difference between these two elements. They don’t function as one.”
Karabits has first-hand evidence that such a dichotomy exists as much today under Vladimir Putin as it did under Stalin.
“I was in Moscow a couple of weeks ago. Many musicians came to me, wanting me to tell them what was going on in reality [in Ukraine]. They are simply not aware, because what they see on television is something totally different from reality. It is still the case in Russia that you have the people, and you have politicians. What politicians do doesn’t mean people are encouraging them to do that.”
Fear among Russia’s politicians, he says, has fuelled the Ukrainian situation. “I don’t think it has to do so much with Ukraine itself. Russia has always considered us to be a neighbour country and now things have changed. We are looking to be part of the European Union, so they feel they are losing part of an old Russian empire. They can’t accept the reality.”
And it’s for that reason, too, that Karabits senses the Crimea situation will be difficult to resolve. “I don’t think it will become Russian territory,” he says. “But it will, I’m afraid, be like a buffer zone where nothing is clear, where it’s very unstable all the time. No-one will bother, not a single country in the world.”
The young musicians of I, Culture know all about instability. The orchestra began life three years ago as a Polish initiative, funded by the Adam Mickiewicz Insitute, intended to draw together young musicians from Europe’s “eastern neighbourhood” of mainly former Soviet republics: Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as Poland itself.
The thinking was, if politics couldn’t unite this string of breakaway states forming a buffer zone along the Russian border, then culture could. “It’s a positive step towards establishing political and cultural connections between these countries,” Karabits believes.
He also sees it as an initiative that is helping foster a sense of nationhood and self-confidence – something, he says, his home country has been struggling to establish since breaking away from the Soviet Union in 1991.
“Ukraine is a huge country, with a population of 46 million,” Kiribits says. “It’s been independent for more than 20 years now, but still its people are asking themselves, ‘What is independence? Why am I feeling unstable in my roots and my traditions?’ It needed those years to understand how things work in the modern world. People started to travel, see how other countries lived and functioned, which got them thinking, ‘ Why can’t we do the same?’”
Karabits currently spends much of his time in the UK as principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. As such, he is fully aware that people in Scotland are asking themselves many of the same questions as the independence referendum approaches. Having lived through Ukraine’s early years of going it alone, he has been following the debate.
“There are some similarities,” he reckons, amused at the impeccable timing of the bag-
piper who has just struck up in the hotel lobby. “But the difference with Scotland is that, as a guest, I can see it already has a strong cultural identity, so even if it does become independent it won’t be any different in that respect.”
“But if we’re talking about economic independence, I think there are probably more dangers because you don’t know what’s going to happen. How will you manage? Which currency will you use? Somebody has to calculate that realistically. It’s not an emotional issue; it’s very pragmatic, because there’s no sense going into independence, then realising that you have to cut something like the Edinburgh [International] Festival because you simply don’t have the money. That would not be good.”
What is good, he reckons, is the way the UK works as it is. “I was thinking the other day that it’s very intelligent how things work here with all the different parts in the UK. This is what Ukraine needs to take as an example, and Russia too. How to take very different people and make it easy for them to live in one country. It’s not easy, but it functions well.
“And this is what Russia needs to look at and consider with the countries around them. Nobody wants to fight with Russians, but the problem is the Russian mentality, because they just don’t allow you to exist as an independent person. They consider Ukrainians as a lower race; as a province of Russia. This is not possible anymore.”
Kirill Karabits conducts the I, Culture Orchestra tomorrow at the Usher Hall in music by Panufnik and Shostakovich, including the Leningrad Sym
phony, 7:30pm.