Why the National Symphony Orchestra went to Moscow

MOSCOW — The clapping began in the upper balcony of the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and spread through the auditorium until the entire audience was clapping in rhythm, like a crowd at a sports stadium, speaking a universal language:

[...] it demonstrated that, at a time when political rhetoric is heated, music may be offering the real language of diplomacy, formalized and couched in centuries of tradition.

“Culture stands tall above the din of politics,” said John Tefft, the American ambassador in Moscow, speaking at a reception for the NSO at his residence on Tuesday night, March 28.

The NSO has come to honor its late music director, Mstislav Rostropovich, at the annual festival that his daughter Olga created in his memory, on what would have been his 90th birthday.

[...] came the 1993 tour, when the orchestra became the first in history to perform in Red Square, to a crowd of 100,000 people — while across town, guns were trained on Moscow’s White House.

The Russians are certainly noting the symbolic implications of an American orchestra coming to honor a Russian, playing literally under a banner emblazoned with Rostropovich’s portrait above the Conservatory stage.

On another level, the NSO’s performances could have been seen as a viable alternative to political diplomacy, showing people from different societies brought together by a common love.

In the United States, the new administration is trying to stamp out the federal funding for the arts that used to make just this kind of cultural exchange possible.

Two weeks before the orchestra left the U.S., the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak — the man notable for his conversations with now-ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn and then-Sen.

Trips like these, said Nicholas J. Cull, the director of the master of public diplomacy program at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, “have immense significance because of their symbolic nature.”

For many of the NSO’s players, diplomacy was of far less concern than doing honor to their beloved former music director.