Jews and anyone sympathetic to Israel now know even an MSO concert is no longer a safe space

These days everyone’s an activist with no respect for time and place. Does pianist Jayson Gillham really think his audience bought tickets to hear him rant against Israel?

Pianist Jayson Gillham pulled a swifty on the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s management.

What pianist thinks his audience actually bought tickets to hear him rant against Israel instead? But last week pianist Jayson Gillham pulled a swifty on the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s management.

Gillham asked to slip in an unscheduled work, Witness, by woke composer Connor D’Netto.

Little did the MSO know D’Netto had dedicated it “to the journalists of Gaza”, and that Gillham would lecture his captive audience on Israel’s “war crimes”, claiming it had killed more than 100 journalists in 10 months, including through “targeted assassinations”.

That’s a mood killer for an audience that had paid to hear some Beethoven, Ligeti, Fauré and Chopin.

Gillham lectured his captive audience on Israel’s ‘war crimes’. Picture: Mark Cranitch

No wonder the MSO got complaints, which freaked the management. After all, the Sydney Theatre Company lost $1.5 million in a boycott from furious subscribers and donors after three actors just wore Palestinian scarfs at a curtain call.

Besides, Gillham was talking through his keffiyeh. There’s zero credible evidence that Israel deliberately killed more than 100 journalists.

True, Israel did admit two weeks ago it had assassinated one, Ismail Al Ghoul, but then showed a copy of an alleged Hamas personnel list seized in Gaza that named him as a member. Israel claimed he’d participated in the October 7 slaughter of 1200 Israelis and specialised in propaganda for Hamas.

So the MSO did the right thing – at first. It apologised to ticketholders, said it didn’t condone its stage being used as “a platform for expressing personal views”, and cancelled Gillham’s second performance.

But MSO musicians then demanded two managers be sacked for alleged crimes against free speech, although I’d bet they’d never have defended Gillham if he’d denounced global warming scaremongers instead.

Alas, the MSO bosses folded and issued a second apology, this time to Gillham and the orchestra.

This time they were wrong, and I think the MSO will suffer for it. Jews and anyone sympathetic to Israel now know even an MSO concert is no longer a safe space. Nor is it safe for people like me who pay to hear them play, not deliver fashionably “radical” sermons on any topic at all.

But even musicians won’t stay in their lane these days. Everyone’s an activist with no respect for time and place, or the right of others to not be badgered.

If Gillham thinks there’s an audience for his politics, then let him sell tickets to a lecture. Don’t use a Beethoven concert as mere bait. That’s a con.