Collateral damage

There is so much collateral damage that comes with the decision made by Putin and his generals to massacre their Ukrainian brothers and sisters, in addition to the cruelty of their deaths. There is the fact that thousands of young Russian lives are being ground up and thrown away, as kids who can't resist being drafted are pulled into this awful nightmare. Putin is murdering his own people as well as his neighbors.

And there is the fact that Ukrainians will now hate Russians for generations, people they had until now accepted as cousins and brothers and sisters.

And the fact that there will be no way to convince those who can't, or refuse to try to, tell the difference between politics and culture that they should not punish the average Russian for the harm done by their government.

I have been following the career of Alexander Malofeev since he was a small child. Adore the guy. And I use that word very sparingly. Watched him grow up. Watched him acquire English. Watched him develop from a child prodigy into a world-class concert pianist I'm always willing to stop what I'm doing to listen to, when a new YouTube video of his comes out. 

If you don't know him, set aside some time. Go to YouTube and start anywhere. Go back and forth between his early days and more recent times. Don't miss that wonderful Poulenc concert he plays with Georgian prodigy Sandro Nebieridze in 2018, where he's still wearing braces. How often do you see a teenager with braces so carried away by the music he is creating?

Don't miss him playing Gershwin. Liszt. Rachmaninoff. I'll stop here.

What got me going this morning on Alexander - Sasha - Malofeev was one of those automated pieces that are all the rage these days, news articles and other pieces spoken by robots who pause in all the wrong places and mispronounce things so badly (It's ma - lo - fay - yev, not ma - lo - FEEV rhymes with leave).

This one is about the fact that Sasha arrived in Canada - Montreal, I believe - just as Putin invaded Ukraine - and cut his tour short. For a while they were reporting that the Vancouver Concert would go on as planned, but today I read that that one too was cancelled.

The commentary is too hard on the concert producers, as if they were insulting this wonderful talent by shutting him down. They weren't. They were taking precautions. Disagree with the move, if you will. I accept their thinking that they want to avoid any chance some wacko in the audience will attack him for being Russian. The thought of that scares the bejeezuz out of me.

And for the record, here's Alexander Malofeev's take on the whole thing, lifted from his Facebook page:

I am contacted by journalists now who want me to make statements. I feel very uncomfortable about this and also think that it can affect my family in Russia.

I still believe Russian culture and music specifically should not be tarnished by the ongoing tragedy, though it is impossible to stay aside now.

Honestly, the only thing I can do now is to pray and cry.

But such is the state of affairs. Russians - the good guys - are taking it on the chin because this pischer Trump idol piece of inhumanity running the show in their country has decided he wants to be Czar of All Slavs.

Anyway, here's the news item, if you want to follow up on the story.

May we live till better times come around.

photo credit