Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Musicians Sound Out for Russian Prisoners

New York Times

Members of the Kremerata Baltica string orchestra emerged on stage first, all dressed in black. Their leader, the violinist Gidon Kremer, took his place in front, wearing a white shirt and a long black vest, with his bespectacled profile to the audience, his knees slightly bent, looking like a forlorn fiddler.

They played something impossibly plaintive, a piece of music in which the sadness built interminably, it seemed. The orchestra took halting breaks followed by a note of even greater sadness. There would be no relief: The musicians seemed simply to stop at one point and take a bow.

“V & V,” for voice and violin, by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, where the taped voice belonged to a long-dead singer, was the opening piece in an unusual concert on Tuesday night that was organized in the geographical center of Europe, a few blocks from the European Court of Human Rights, to draw attention to the continuing struggle of two former oil magnates, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and Platon A. Lebedev, and, organizers said, other Russian political prisoners.