Ukrainian musicians banned from performing with Netrebko at a festival in Germany

BERLIN, 27 January – RIA Novosti. Ukrainian musicians and actors will not be able to perform with Anna Netrebko at the International May Festival in Wiesbaden. declaration Vadym Kostyuk, Ukraine’s Consul General to Hesse, after futile attempts to force the festival-goer to cancel the participation of the Russian opera singer.

“They’re not allowed to do that,” Kostyuk said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. According to the consul general, the ban is due to the Russian opera singer’s inclusion on Ukraine’s sanctions list. Whether the ban applies to all days of the festival was not disclosed by the Ukrainian state representative.

He announced that the ban would apply to the Kharkiv Taras Shevchenko Theater and the Ukrainian National Symphony Orchestra, which was invited to the festival.

Earlier, Uwe Erik Laufenberg, director of the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden, where the festival will take place in May, had refused to cancel Netrebko’s performance despite advice from city and federal state officials. Laufenberg also noted that the aforementioned Ukrainian artists had no objections to the performance of the Russian opera diva.

In July last year, the organizer of the Netrebko concert in Stuttgart canceled the event with the singer’s participation, and the concert in Frankfurt was postponed by agreement with the organizers. Some cancellations and postponements of Netrebko’s concerts are described by the organizers as “solidarity” with Ukraine.

Vladimir Zelensky previously imposed sanctions on 317 people who are citizens of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Among them are directors Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrei Konchalovsky, opera singer Anna Netrebko, artists Dmitry Kharatyan, Evgeny Petrosyan and others.