Matías Tarnopolsky

It is the writers and the poets and the musicians who get silenced when authoritarian regimes take hold.

David Lang is a fearless artist, but he's not laboring under the conditions Shostakovich labored under of great suffering or Prokofiev.

He's not fearing for his life, and I can't imagine how that impacts an artist, though I have a sense listening to the Shostakovich symphonies and string quartets.

Things are not what they seem.

Every word and act matters.

There is a human dimension and a human cost to everything we do, and we need to wake up to that.

Once awakened, don't accept the suffering of others as okay.