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    Sarajevo Film Festival, Born in War, Turns 30

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    The Sarajevo Film Festival, now 30 years old, grew out of underground screenings during the siege of the city. Those roots still define the event’s character.From 1992 to 1996, Serbian forces laid siege to the city of Sarajevo, relentlessly bombarding it and cutting off electricity, heat, running water and regular food supplies. Because of snipers perched on hillsides and constant shelling, going outside was a life-threatening act.Yet these were the conditions under which the Sarajevo Film Festival came to life. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival, which runs through Friday, has grown to become the premier movie industry event for the Balkan region. But its roots still define its character.After the breakup of Yugoslavia, ethnic tensions in Bosnia deepened, resulting in a violent nationalistic campaign led by Bosnian Serbs targeting Bosniaks and Croats. When war broke out in Sarajevo, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder, was living in a cellar with other members of what he called a “punk” collective — artist types who worked in theater, music and film, many of whom were involved with the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Performing Arts.“After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically, but then we asked ourselves: ‘How are we going to survive mentally?’” Purivatra said over coffee in a downtown square. Purivatra and his collaborators began staging performances in the cellar and inviting artists to create installations in the underground passages that Sarajevans used to move around the city.The first office for the Sarajevo Film Festival, in 1995.Obala Art CentarEventually, word of these efforts got around to the international press, which inspired writers and artists from outside of Bosnia to visit Sarajevo and raise awareness of the city’s plight through acts of cultural solidarity. Susan Sontag, for instance, brought a candlelight production of “Waiting for Godot” to life with Bosnian actors and theater experts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cold Plunges and Cuddling With Cats: Photographing the ‘Great Performers’

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      What do celebrities do in their downtime? A new project by The New York Times Magazine captures the awards season’s buzziest actors in their element.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The photographer James Nachtwey showed up at Bradley Cooper’s farmhouse in Pennsylvania one freezing morning in January, armed with a coat and a camera.“Let’s take a walk,” an affable Mr. Cooper suggested, leading Mr. Nachtwey through his 33-acre property until they arrived at an ice-crusted stream.After sharing that he practiced mindfulness by taking cold plunges — immersing himself in freezing water for minutes at a time — Mr. Cooper proceeded to strip down to his black briefs and dive in, flipping over onto his back and closing his eyes.“I thought I’d have 30 seconds to take the picture,” Mr. Nachtwey said in a recent phone conversation from his home in New Hampshire. “But he stayed in for at least 10 minutes.”The resulting photo of Mr. Cooper, which appears on the cover of this month’s Great Performers issue of The New York Times Magazine, is one of 12 portraits of this award season’s buzziest actors. Mr. Nachtwey captured the images over a three-week period in January in Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania and Atlanta.Among them: Mark Ruffalo training his own camera on street pigeons, Paul Giamatti curled up on a couch with cats at his favorite used bookstore and Emma Stone wandering through steamy Manhattan streets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Balkan Leader Gets the Hollywood Treatment, Starring Kevin Spacey

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      A director cast the beleaguered actor as Franjo Tudjman, the late Croatian leader, whom some call a patriot and others revile as an ethnonationalist zealot.A hagiographic movie about the stiff former leader of a small Balkan country was never going to be a global box-office hit. But its director, a former water polo champion turned darling of right-wing Croatian cinema, found a novel way to generate some buzz: He cast Kevin Spacey as its star.While Hollywood has generally turned its back on Mr. Spacey because of sexual assault accusations against him, purging the 63-year-old from its roster of bankable talent and deleting him from productions already in the works, a new cinematic tribute to a nationalist leader some view as a dangerous bigot puts the “House of Cards” star front and center.The 90-minute film celebrates Croatia’s first president, the late Franjo Tudjman, a leader revered by fans as a Balkan George Washington but reviled by foes as an ethnonationalist zealot. The movie, “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” goes into general release in Croatia in February and will be screened in other countries, including the United States.The director, Jakov Sedlar, 70, conceded in an interview that in Croatia, many people, particularly the young, do not care much about Mr. Tudjman, a highly divisive authoritarian figure whom the historian Tony Judt described as “one of the more egregiously unattractive” leaders to emerge in the early 1990s from the rubble of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia was formerly a part.Warren Zimmerman, who was the American ambassador to Yugoslavia as the multiethnic country unraveled, warned in a 1992 cable to Washington that Mr. Tudjman’s election as Croatia’s president in May 1990 had brought to power “a narrow-minded, crypto-racist regime” that, in tandem with Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, was unleashing “nationalism, the Balkan killer.”But having Mr. Spacey play Mr. Tudjman, the director said last week in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, “will definitely help” break through a wall of what is at best public indifference and at worst fierce hostility toward the man who led Croatia’s battle for independence.“Ask people whether they have heard of Spacey or Tudjman, they will, of course, say Spacey,” he said. The American actor’s fame, no matter the risk of it curdling into infamy, and undisputed acting talent, Mr. Sedlar added, “will certainly attract people to see my film about Tudjman.”The director declared that Mr. Tudjman, who died in 1999, “was not a nationalist, but a patriot, an absolutely positive personality.” And Mr. Spacey, a two-time Oscar winner and a friend of the director for more than a decade, “is the best of the best actors” and “absolutely innocent,” Mr. Sedlar said.Kevin Spacey on the film set of “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” by Jakov Sedlar.Karla JuricBoth men, Mr. Sedlar says, have been unjustly maligned: Mr. Spacey by accusers like Anthony Rapp, a fellow actor whose battery claim against the disgraced star was thrown out in October by a New York civil court, and Mr. Tudjman by domestic political rivals and foreign critics angry over his role in the blood-soaked destruction of Yugoslavia.One of seven states that emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia, Croatia today is a stable democracy of fewer than four million people, a popular tourist destination and a global soccer power.But the struggle to shape the history of the Yugoslav wars, critical to national identity in each of the countries spawned by the violence of the early 1990s, still rages across the region, particularly among filmmakers in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, the nations that saw the worst of the fighting.“The history of the war is a constant process of remembering and forgetting,” said Dejan Jovic, a professor at the University of Zagreb. Memory wars, he added, are especially active in cinema. Each side, Mr. Jovic said, “remembers only what it wants and forgets the rest.”Mr. Sedlar’s new film makes little effort to give a full and balanced history. It avoids any mention of crimes committed under Mr. Tudjman’s leadership, like attacks on Bosnian civilians, the ethnic cleansing of Croatia’s once large Serb minority and the destruction of a 16th-century bridge in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1993. It skips his outreach to extreme nationalists linked during World War II to the Ustashe, a fascist group whose brutality shocked even some German Nazis.But, the director insisted: “This is not propaganda. It is just my view.”Croatia, almost ethnically homogeneous as a result of the 1990s violence that drove out many Serbs and members of other minorities, has mostly moved beyond the narrow ethnonationalism of Mr. Tudjman’s era and become a member of the European Union and NATO. While Mr. Sedlar has been promoting his movie, the government had been focusing on getting the country ready to adopt the euro and to enter the borderless Schengen zone, on Jan. 1.The government, though led by the political party Mr. Tujdman founded, wanted nothing to do with Mr. Sedlar’s film and rebuffed his appeals for funding. The director said he raised the 400,000 euros needed — about $425,000 — from private donors.Mr. Tudjman of Croatia, left, and President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia meeting in Belgrade in 1991.Petar Kujundzic/ReutersHe initially hoped to make a full-scale biopic to mark the centenary of the former Croatian president’s birth. But he settled for a more modest production built around Mr. Spacey’s reciting Mr. Tudjman’s stirring speeches.The director said Mr. Spacey had taken the part out of friendship, and had neither asked for nor received any payment. Mr. Spacey’s lawyer, Jennifer L. Keller, did not respond to a request for comment.Whether playing Mr. Tudjman will help Mr. Spacey in his quest for rehabilitation is another matter. It is not his first acting role since accusations against him surfaced in 2017 — he has appeared as a detective in an Italian feature and as a mysterious henchman in an American thriller — but his role as Mr. Tudjman is perhaps his riskiest.Laura Silber, an author of “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation,” said she was mystified that anyone would want to be associated with a tribute to the former Croatian leader. She had met him several times while covering the Yugoslav wars as a journalist and found him, she said, to be “repulsive” — an unashamed bigot with a “superiority complex” who “could not control his loathing for Muslims,” the largest ethnic group in neighboring Bosnia.“He was like Dr. Strangelove meets Adolf Hitler,” she recalled.Mr. Tudjman had fought against fascism during World War II, joining Communist partisans opposed to Hitler’s puppet regime. But in the 1990s, he refused to condemn the Ustashe legacy and decreed that independent Croatia should adopt a red-and-white checkerboard coat of arms that had been used by ethnic Croats for centuries but that closely resembles the Ustashe’s symbol.Mr. Sedlar, who served for years as Mr. Tudjman’s cultural attaché in New York, comes across as a calm and reasonable man entirely free of the violent, often racist rhetoric that gave Croatian nationalism such a bad name. But he brooks no criticism of Mr. Tudjman.“Compared with his establishment of an independent Croat nation, all the other stuff is absolutely unimportant,” Mr. Sedlar said, adding, “Without Tudjman, independent Croatia would not exist.”Mr. Sedlar delivering a speech before a screening of his movie in May to mark the centenary of Mr. Tudjman’s birth. Karla JuricVesna Skare-Ozbolt, a fan of the former president who worked in his office as an adviser from 1991 until his death of cancer, insisted that while Mr. Tudjman, a former Communist general in the Yugoslav Army, had some unappealing personality traits, “He deserves a film.”“He is the father of the nation,” she said. “He did a great job.”Mr. Spacey’s performance in the film, which includes archival footage of Mr. Tudjman making wartime speeches in Croatian, consists largely of Mr. Spacey intoning the same speeches in English, walking through government buildings in white-soled sneakers and scribbling in a book.Critics in Croatia have been divided along political lines in their reviews, though even hostile ones have praised Mr. Spacey’s performance.One panned the film as “garbage” but described Mr. Spacey as “basically the best part of the movie,” adding, “He had a difficult task: to recite in English verbal sausages from Tudjman’s better-known speeches and give them a certain passion without any clear context.”Despite his legal victory in New York, Mr. Spacey still faces serious legal troubles in Britain, where he is expected to stand trial this year on charges of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty.The jury of history is still out on Mr. Tudjman, and Ms. Silber, the former war correspondent, said it was unlikely to reach a clear verdict any time soon, at least not in Croatia.“He will never be judged by history in Croatia because he delivered their independence,” she said.Julia Jacobs More

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      How Russian Action Movies Are Selling War

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      For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and see their cartoonish heroes and villains.Recently, on YouTube, I watched “Granit,” a Russian action movie from 2021. I did this knowing a few relevant things about the film. One is that it was produced by Aurum — a company controlled by one of Vladimir Putin’s allies, Evgeny Prigozhin — in part to glorify the actions of the Wagner Group, a mercenary network Prigozhin founded; the syndicate has been accused of fueling chaos from Syria to the Central African Republic to Ukraine, where Wagner mercenaries have become an increasingly significant part of Russia’s grinding invasion. Another is that “Granit” was just one artifact in a whole trove of content — memoirs, comic books, travel videos — that is variously referred to as the Wagner subculture, the Wagnerverse or the Wagner Extended Universe. Not unlike old American mercenary magazines, all of it puts a righteous and alluring face on going off to kill and die in unofficial operations aligned with Kremlin interests.But it’s “Granit” and other big-budget shoot-em-ups, like “Touriste” and “Solntsepyok,” that are the best known elements of the W.E.U. They are aimed, in part, at the countries where Wagner operates: As The Financial Times has reported, “Touriste,” set in the Central African Republic, had a premiere at the national stadium in the country’s capital, Bangui. Another audience, of course, is Russians, though not necessarily the Russian mainstream. Wagner movies air on state TV, but at odd times; they feature recognizable actors, but not elite talent. It’s possible Prigozhin is aiming for Russians with a taste for action and weaponry and a paucity of job options — people who might be enticed to fight for money, and who may already see enough pro-Wagner social media to follow the Extended Universe’s memes and internal references.It is in its hints of explicit politicization, though, that ‘Granit’ sings.Knowing these grim motivations is part of why I wanted to watch “Granit.” But it’s also true that I was raised in the monoculture-era Massachusetts suburbs on exactly the kind of jingoistic American action movies that “Granit” is trying to replicate, and so there are certain tropes to which I’m hard-wired to react. When Granit, the character, finally popped up, 13 minutes into the film, and promptly disarmed a bunch of dudes, I involuntarily gasped: He was shredding.Granit — that’s his code name — is a righteous ass-kicker. He is in Mozambique to help train the country’s armed forces as they combat indistinct ISIS-backing bandits, but he is not there to fight heroically alongside them; his boss even says, “I warn you — no fighting and no heroics.” But Granit cannot help himself. He and his fellow mercenaries whip the Mozambican forces into shape, then shoot it out with the bandits. He also finds time to look out for a local kid who, inevitably, learns to say spasibo, or “thank you.”As a movie, “Granit” is bad in predictable ways, echoing your lesser dumb-fun Steven Seagal flicks. Oleg Chernov, the lead actor, has a natural world-weariness, a catlike grace and the kind of nice, big head of which Josh Brolin might approve. Occasionally he makes the insane dialogue work. (“In war, it’s not the guns that decide, but balls,” he says at one point. “The one with the stronger balls wins.”) It is in its hints of explicit politicization, though, that “Granit” sings. “For a Russian, an idea is more important than money,” says one villain. “If you give a Russian an idea, he’ll work for free.” When someone suggests that the Russian fighters are out of their depth in Mozambique, this same villain — now clearly enthralled by the Russians — counters that the Maputo street on which they’re speaking is called Av. Vladimir Lenine. Presumably “Granit” is not carrying the torch for Marxism-Leninism. The street is meant to represent the power and historical significance of Russia in general.The messaging in this film is so scattered that you may be left seeing signs everywhere. At one point, Granit and the crew smash glass Coca-Cola bottles to build a makeshift booby trap. Clever knock of American imperialism, or a nod to “Home Alone”? In the end, Granit dies on his back, smiling up at birds. According to recovered Wagner documents, a Russian code-named Granit really did die in Mozambique in 2019. But reporting indicates that Wagner soldiers bumbled their way through the mission in a manner nearly the complete opposite of what’s seen in the movie. “The undergrowth is so thick there that all the high-tech equipment Wagner brought ceases to be effective,” a Mozambican intelligence specialist told The Moscow Times. “The Russians arrived with drones, but they can’t actually use them.” In “Granit,” of course, the drones work fine.The action movie, as a format, has always been great at presenting a worldview. As an explicit recruitment vehicle, the Wagner movies’ closest American analogue might be Frank Capra’s World War II series, “Why We Fight.” But their inspiration definitely comes from the Cold War 1980s, when America was churning out nationalistic stuff like “Red Dawn,” “Invasion U.S.A.” and “Rambo III” — films with an obvious, unexamined arrangement of global good guys and bad guys. More recent American propaganda is known for a neutered abstractness — this year’s “Top Gun: Maverick” is deliberately vague about the identity of its foreign enemy, and while the “Transformers” movies pan droolingly over expensive Pentagon-provided hardware, the soldiers in those movies are fighting space robots. Movies in which Americans save the planet from evil may be part and parcel of a political reality in which cutting the Pentagon budget is a nonstarter, but at their inception, the point of these films is to make money.For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures. The Wagner movies don’t ever actually say the name “Wagner,” and Prigozhin only recently admitted that he is the group’s founder. But in September a video surfaced in which a man assumed to be Prigozhin stands in the yard of a Russian penal colony and explicitly recruits for Wagner by offering sentence-reduction in exchange for service. Just as in the Wagner movies, the inevitability of death is front of mind. “Do you have anyone who can get you out of prison alive?” he asks. “There are two, Allah and God. I am taking you out of here alive. But it’s not always that I bring you back alive.” In another portion of his speech, he is more specific. “The first convicts who fought with me, that was at the Vuhlehirsk power station, with 40 people,” he says, referring to an actual battle in Ukraine. “Out of the three dead, one was 52 years old. He served 30 years in prison. He died a hero.”When I first saw this video, I wondered if a tonal shift might be coming for the Wagner Extended Universe — one in which cinematic tributes to moralizing mercenaries are replaced by a fatalistic social realism. Then I learned that Prigozhin’s production company has already announced the production of a new big-budget feature. Online, Wagner watchers are guessing it will depict the group’s battles in Ukraine. It’s going to be called “The Best in Hell.” More

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      An Orchestra Supports Ukraine, and Reunites a Couple Parted by War

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      “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello,” a musician says as he joins the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which is made up of refugees who fled the war and artists who stayed behind.WARSAW — After years of struggling to make a living as musicians in Ukraine, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova felt they had finally built a stable life. They were husband-and-wife artists in the Odessa Philharmonic — he plays the cello, she the violin — sharing a love for Bach partitas and the music from “Star Wars.” They lived in an apartment on the banks of the Black Sea with their 8-year-old daughter, Daryna.Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Vikhrova fled for the Czech Republic with her daughter and mother, bringing a few hundred dollars in savings, some clothes and her violin. Dovbysh, 39, who was not allowed to leave because he is of military age, stayed behind and assisted in efforts to defend the city, gathering sand from beaches to reinforce barriers and protect monuments and playing Ukrainian music on videos honoring the country’s soldiers. “We spent every day together,” Vikhrova, 38, said. “We did everything together. And suddenly our beautiful life was taken away.”Dovbysh was granted special permission to leave the country last month to join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a new ensemble of 74 musicians that was gathering in Warsaw, the first stop on an international tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture and denouncing Russia’s invasion. Carrying his cello, and wearing a small golden cross around his neck, he boarded a bus for Poland, looking forward to playing for the cause, and also to being reunited with another member of the fledgling ensemble: his wife.“I love my country so much,” he said as the bus passed ponds, churches and raspberry fields in Hrebenne, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine. “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello.”The bus crossed the border and drove into Hrebenne, in Poland, on its way to Warsaw, where the newly formed orchestra would meet for the first time to rehearse.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesWhen his bus arrived in Warsaw, he rushed to meet Vikhrova. He knocked on the door of her hotel room, waited nervously, and then embraced her when she opened it. She teased him about his decision to wear shorts for the 768-mile journey, despite the cool weather, a legacy of his upbringing in balmy Odessa. She gave him a figurine of a “Star Wars” creature, Baby Yoda, a belated birthday present.“I’m so happy,” he said. “Finally, we are almost like a family again.”The next morning, they took their chairs in the new Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, led by the Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, to prepare for an 12-city tour to rally support for Ukraine. Beginning here in Warsaw, the tour has continued in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities, and will travel to the United States this week to play at Lincoln Center on Aug. 18 and 19 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Aug. 20.The tour has been organized with the support of the Ukrainian government. Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, said in a recent statement celebrating the founding of the orchestra that “artistic resistance” to Russia was paramount. The orchestra also has the backing of powerful figures in the music industry. Wilson’s husband, Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has played a critical role, helping line up engagements and benefactors, and the Met has helped arrange the tour. Waldemar Dabrowski, the director of the Wielki Theater, Warsaw’s opera house, provided rehearsal space and helped secure financial support from the Polish government.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.At the first rehearsal, musicians filed into the Wielki Theater carrying blue and yellow bags; instrument cases covered in peace signs and hearts; and tattered volumes of Ukrainian poems and hymns.The orchestra was the idea of the Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is of Ukrainian descent. “For Ukraine!” she proclaimed at the first rehearsal.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAs the musicians began to warm up at rehearsal, Wilson took her place at the podium, locked eyes with the players, and spoke about the need to stand up to Moscow.“For Ukraine!” she said, throwing her fist into the air. Then the orchestra began playing Dvorak.The musicians had arrived mostly as strangers to one another. But slowly they grew closer, sharing stories of neighborhoods pounded by bombs, while the refugees among them recounted their long, tense journeys across crowded borders this winter.Among the violins was Iryna Solovei, a member of the orchestra at the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, who fled for Warsaw at the start of the invasion along with her 14-year-old daughter. Since March, they have been among the more than 30 Ukrainian refugees living inside the Wielki Theater, in offices that were converted to dormitories.In March, Solovei, watched from a distance as her home in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian missiles. She shared photos of her charred living room with her fellow players, telling them how much she missed Ukraine and worried about her husband, who still plays with the Kharkiv ensemble.Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarOn the Ground: A series of explosions that Ukraine took credit for rocked a key Russian air base in Kremlin-occupied Crimea. Russia played down the extent of the damage, but the evidence available told a different story.Heavy Losses: The staggeringly high rate of Russian casualties in the war means that Moscow may not be able to achieve one of his key objectives: seizing the entire eastern region of Ukraine.Nuclear Shelter: The Russian military is using а nuclear power station in southern Ukraine as a fortress, as fighting intensifies in the region. The risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident has led the United Nations to sound the alarm and plead for access to the site to assess the situation.Starting Over: Ukrainians forced from their hometowns by Russia’s invasion find some solace, and success setting up businesses in new cities.“Everyone has been hurt,” she said. “Some people have been hurt physically. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people have lost their homes.”She reminisced about her days as an orchestra musician in Ukraine, and the deep connections she felt with audiences there. To cope with the trauma of war, she takes walks in a park in Warsaw, where a Ukrainian guitarist plays folk songs at sunset.“The war is like a horrific dream,” she added. “We can forget about it for a moment, but we can never escape it.”Iryna Solovei, left, holding a violin, before the orchestra’s first performance at the Wielki Theater in Warsaw. She has been living in the theater since March.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesAt the back of the orchestra, in the percussion section, stood Yevhen Ulianov, a 33-year-old member of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.His daughter was born on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. He told his fellow players how he and his wife, a singer, had gone to the hospital in Kyiv a few hours before the war started. As she went into labor, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly, and at one point they were rushed from the maternity ward to the basement of the hospital.“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “I could only think, ‘How will we get out of here alive?’”Ulianov did not play for two months after the invasion, as concerts in Kyiv were canceled and theaters elsewhere were damaged. The orchestra reduced his salary by a third in April, and he relied on savings to pay his bills. Inside his apartment near the center of the city, he practiced on a vibraphone, taking shelter in a corridor when air-raid sirens sounded.“We didn’t know what to do — should we stay or should we leave?” he said. “What if the Russian army came to Kyiv? Would we ever be able to play again?”‘Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.’Before the orchestra’s first concert, late last month in Warsaw, Vikhrova and Dovbysh were anxious.They had spent more than a week rehearsing the program, which included pieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer. But they were unsure how the audience might react. And they were grappling with their fears about the war.Vikhrova had been trying to build a new life in the Czech Republic with their daughter, joining a local orchestra. But she worried about her husband’s safety “every second, every minute, every hour,” she said. She slept near her phone so that she would be woken up by warnings about air raids in Odessa. She grew anxious after one attack there before Easter, when her husband saw Russian missiles in the sky but had no time to take shelter. To take her mind off the war, she played Bach and traditional Ukrainian songs.On their first evening together in five months, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova, a married couple who were parted by the war and reunited to play together in the orchestra, attended a welcoming party for the new ensemble at Warsaw’s opera house, the Wielki Theater. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesHolding her husband’s hand backstage, Vikhrova said she longed for the day when they could return to Ukraine with their daughter, who was staying with her mother in the Czech Republic for the duration of the tour.“I feel like I’m leading a double life,” she said. “Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.”Dovbysh remembered the fear in his daughter’s eyes when she and her mother left Odessa in February. He recalled taking time to explain the war and telling her she would be safe. He promised they would see each other again soon.When the tour ends this week and his military exemption expires, he is scheduled to return to Odessa. It is unclear when he will be able to see his family again.“Every day,” he said, “I dream of the moment when we can see each other again.”‘We live with a constant sense of worry.’As the war drags on, the musicians have at times struggled to keep their focus. They spend much of their free time checking their phones for news of Russian attacks, sending warnings to relatives.Marko Komonko, 46, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said it was agonizing to watch the war from a distance, likening the experience to a parent caring for an ill child. He fled Ukraine in March for Sweden, where he now plays in the orchestra at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” he said.“We live with a constant sense of worry,” said Marko Komonko, the concert master, far right. Komonko, who now plays at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, was joined at a rehearsal by Ustym Zhuk, who plays the viola, far left, and Adrian Bodnar a violinist, center. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesFor more than two months after the invasion, he said, he felt nothing when he played his violin. Then, in early May, he began to feel a mix of sadness and hope when he performed a Ukrainian folk melody at a concert in Stockholm.For some, playing in the orchestra has strengthened a sense of Ukrainian identity. Alisa Kuznetsova, 30, was in Russia when the war began; since 2019, she had worked as a violinist in the Mariinsky Orchestra. In late March, she resigned from the orchestra in protest and moved to Tallinn, Estonia, where she began playing in the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.When she joined the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, she initially felt guilty, she said, worried that the other players would see her as a traitor because of her work in Russia. But she said her colleagues had reassured her that she was welcome.“For my soul, for my heart,” she said, “this has been really important.”In European cultural capitals, the orchestra has been greeted with standing ovations and positive reviews from critics.“A stirring show of Ukrainian defiance,” a review in The Daily Telegraph said of the orchestra’s performance at the Proms, the BBC’s classical music festival. The Guardian wrote of “tears and roars of delight” for the new ensemble.The players got a standing ovation, their first of many on the tour, at their first performance in Warsaw. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York TimesBut the musicians say the measure of success will not be reviews, but their ability to shine a light on Ukraine and showcase a cultural identity that Russia has tried to erase.Nazarii Stets, 31, a double bass player from Kyiv, has been redoubling his efforts to build a digital library of scores by Ukrainian composers, so their music can be widely downloaded and performed. He plays in the Kyiv Kamerata, a national ensemble devoted to contemporary Ukrainian music.“If we are not fighting for culture,” he said, “then what is the point of fighting?”Wilson, who came up with the idea for the orchestra in March and plans to revive it next summer, said she made a point of featuring Silvestrov’s symphony as a way of promoting Ukrainian culture. Near the end of the piece, the composer wrote a series of breathing sounds for the brass, an effect meant to mimic the last breaths of his wife.Wilson, who dedicated the piece to Ukrainians killed in the war, said she instructed the orchestra to think of the sounds not as death, but as life.“It’s the breath of life, to show that their spirits go on,” she said in an interview.Vikhrova said the tour had brought her closer to her husband and her fellow players. She cries after each performance of the Silvestrov symphony, and when the orchestra plays an arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem as an encore.“This has connected our hearts,” she said. “We feel part of something bigger than ourselves.”Anna Tsybko contributed reporting. More

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      U.K. Will Host Eurovision in 2023

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      Organizers had ruled out Ukraine from hosting because of safety concerns from Russia’s ongoing invasion.Britain, the runner-up of Eurovision 2022, will host the popular song contest in 2023 instead of war-torn Ukraine, which won the competition and the right to host next year’s event but was ruled out by organizers because of safety concerns.The announcement on Monday made official what had been widely predicted since Ukraine won the event in May. Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, said in a statement that the process of choosing a city to host would begin soon.“Being asked to host the largest and most complex music competition in the world is a great privilege,” he said in the statement. “The BBC is committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Officials and artists in Ukraine protested last month when the competition’s organizers, the European Broadcasting Union, said that Russia’s ongoing invasion meant Ukraine could not provide “the security and operational guarantees” needed to host the event. Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, said in a statement on Monday that the 2023 contest “will showcase the creativity and skill of one of Europe’s most experienced public broadcasters whilst ensuring this year’s winners, Ukraine, are celebrated and represented throughout the event.”Representatives from UA:PBC, a Ukrainian broadcaster, will work with the BBC on the Ukrainian elements of the show, Eurovision said in a statement. Mykola Chernotytskyi, head of the broadcaster’s managing board, said in a statement that the event “will not be in Ukraine but in support of Ukraine,” adding that organizers would “add Ukrainian spirit to this event.”The competition invites artists from countries across Europe, plus some farther afield including Australia and Israel, to compete to be voted the best act. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner.Britain has hosted eight times before, most recently in 1998. At least 17 cities in Britain have said they intend to bid for becoming the host city, organizers said. More

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      Ukraine Benefit Featuring Russian Ensemble Is Canceled in Vienna

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      A planned benefit concert in support of Ukraine was canceled in Vienna on Monday amid concerns about the Russian-based ensemble it was to feature, MusicAeterna, which is led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis and is supported by a state-owned bank in Russia.The concert, organized by the Konzerthaus in Vienna, one of Austria’s premier halls, was to take place on Tuesday and feature MusicAeterna, which is based in St. Petersburg and is financed in part by VTB Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions. The United States and other western countries have recently imposed sanctions on the bank because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The Vienna Konzerthaus said it canceled the concert after the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, Vasyl Khymynets, expressed concern about featuring Russian artists at an event meant to benefit Ukraine. The ensemble’s founder, Mr. Currentzis, who was born in Athens, is a charismatic conductor who has built a large following in Russia and abroad.“The Vienna Konzerthaus cannot ignore the political dimension of the performance of a St. Petersburg-based orchestra at a time of immense suffering caused by the Russian Federation’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Matthias Naske, the hall’s chief executive and artistic director, said in a statement. “We understand and share the despair over the war crimes in Ukraine and condemn this aggression without reservation.”The Konzerthaus said that it would suspend ticket sales for future appearances by MusicAeterna until the group secured an independent source of financing. But it also said it would allow MusicAeterna to perform a separate concert planned for Monday night. (The ensemble already performed at the hall on Sunday.)Mr. Khymynets and the Ukrainian foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The cancellation of the benefit concert comes as tensions between Russia and the west continue to reverberate in the performing arts. Several high-profile Russian artists have lost global engagements in recent weeks because of their ties to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.MusicAeterna, renowned for its intense, electric performances, has come under scrutiny for its connections to VTB Bank, which has helped finance some of its tours and recording projects. Mr. Currentzis called for peace in Ukraine in a statement issued last month by the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Germany, where he is chief conductor, though he has not directly criticized the Russian government or Mr. Putin.“Teodor Currentzis and the members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra unequivocally support the common appeal for peace and reconciliation,” the statement said. The orchestra has said it was aware of MusicAeterna’s association with VTB Bank, but it has continued to defend Mr. Currentzis. “From today’s perspective, this is certainly problematic, but it has existed for a longer period of time,” the statement said, referring to the bank’s support for MusicAeterna.The benefit concert in Vienna was to feature works by Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and others.MusicAeterna is set to perform in Germany, Austria and France in the coming weeks. Mr. Currentzis is scheduled to lead the ensemble in a production of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” at the Salzburg Festival this summer, paired with “De temporum fine comoedia” by the German composer Carl Orff. The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, another major concert hall, said on Monday it had no plans to cancel a series of engagements this week by MusicAeterna. More

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky Gives Emotional Speech at the Grammys

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      Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressed the Grammy Awards in a video, giving an emotional plea for support in his country’s war against Russia.“What is more opposite to music?” Zelensky said. “The silence of ruined cities and killed people.”The leader’s aides had lobbied for an appearance at the Academy Awards last week, but organizers did not commit to it, drawing some backlash.In his brief address, Zelensky, an actor turned wartime leader, emphasized that many of the musicians in his country were fighting in the battle against the Russian invasion.“Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos,” he said. “They sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them.”“Support us in any way you can,” he added. “Any, but not silence.”After Zelensky’s address, John Legend performed his song “Free,” featuring a Ukrainian singer, Mika Newton, and a poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk, who fled the country days ago.Here is Zelensky’s full speech:The war. What is more opposite to music? The silence of ruined cities and killed people. Our children draw swooping rockets, not shooting stars. Over 400 children have been injured and 153 children died. And we’ll never see them drawing. Our parents are happy to wake up in the morning in bomb shelters. But alive. Our loved ones don’t know if we will be together again. The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence. Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them. But the music will break through anyway. We defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound on our land. We are fighting Russia, which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence. Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV. Support us in any way you can. Any — but not silence. And then peace will come. To all our cities the war is destroying — Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Volnovakha, Mariupol and others — they are legends already. But I have a dream of them living and free. Free like you on the Grammy stage.Many in the music industry have made public statements opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and showing support for the Ukrainian people. On Sunday night at the Grammys, the Recording Academy teamed up with Global Citizen to highlight its “Stand Up for Ukraine” initiative.The three major record conglomerates — Sony, Warner Music and Universal Music — have all suspended operations in Russia in response to the war, along with the touring behemoth Live Nation, which released a statement saying the company will “cease work with any and all Russian-based suppliers.” Spotify suspended its streaming service in Russia and closed its office in Moscow.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Valentin Silvestrov. More

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      Ukrainians Fill Streets With Music, Echoing Past War Zones

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      When bombs began falling on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv late last month, forcing Vera Lytovchenko to shelter in the basement of her apartment building, she took her violin with her, hoping it might bring comfort.In the weeks since, Lytovchenko, a violinist for the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet, has given impromptu concerts almost every day for a group of 11 neighbors. In the cold, cramped basement, with nothing in the way of decoration except candles and yellow tulips, she has performed Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Ukrainian folk songs.“My music can show that we are still human,” she said in an interview. “We need not just food or water. We need our culture. We are not like animals now. We still have our music, and we still have our hope.”As their cities have come under siege by Russian forces, Ukrainian artists have turned to music for comfort and connection, filling streets, apartment buildings and train stations with the sounds of Beethoven and Mozart.A cellist performed Bach in the center of a deserted street in Kharkiv, with the blown-out windows of the regional police headquarters behind him. A trumpeter played the Ukrainian national anthem in a subway station being used as a bomb shelter. A pianist played a Chopin étude in her apartment, surrounded by ashes and debris left by Russian shelling.Impromptu performances by ordinary citizens have been a feature of many modern conflicts, in the Balkans, Syria and elsewhere. In the social media age, they have become an important way for artists in war zones to build a sense of community and bring attention to suffering. Here are several notable examples.The Pianist of YarmoukAeham Ahmad became a YouTube star by playing piano in the ruins of a Damascus, Syria, neighborhood. This video follows his journey to Europe through a single song, starting in Syria and ending at a performance in a Berlin.Photos by Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesAeham Ahmad gained attention in 2013 when he began posting videos showing him playing piano in the ruins of Yarmouk, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, that was gutted amid his country’s civil war. Sometimes friends and neighbors sang along. The news media began calling Ahmad the “pianist of Yarmouk.”At the time, government troops kept his neighborhood cordoned off, hitting it with artillery and sometimes airstrikes, as insurgent groups fought for control. Many people suffered from a lack of access to food and medicine; some died.“I want to give them a beautiful dream,” Ahmad told The New York Times in 2013. “To change this black color at least into gray.”Musicians have long played a role in helping people cope with the physical and psychological devastation of war.“They’re trying to recreate community, which has been fractured by war,” said Abby Anderton, an associate professor of music at Baruch College who has studied music in the aftermath of war. “People have a real desire to create normalcy, even if everything around them seems to be disintegrating.”The Cellist of SarajevoDuring the Bosnian war in 1992, Vedran Smailovic became known as the “cellist of Sarajevo” after he commemorated the dead by playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor every day at 4 p.m. in the ruins of a downtown square in Sarajevo. He kept playing even as 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on the city.“Many, like Mr. Smailovic, who played the cello for the Sarajevo Opera, reach for an anchor amid the chaos by doing something, however small, that carries them back to the stable, reasoned life they led before,” The Times reported then.“My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim, but I don’t care,” Smailovic said at the time. “I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a pacifist.” He added: “I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can.”A Russian Orchestra in a War ZoneThe Mariinsky Theater Orchestra of Russia held a special concert in the historic city of Palmyra, Syria.While ordinary citizens have risen to fame for wartime performances, governments have also sought to promote nationalism in wartime by staging concerts of their own.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 8Olga Smirnova. More