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Hi, I'm Winston Marshall and welcome to Marshall Matters, my new show with The Spectator.

I'm a musician and I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford & Sons, which I quit in 2021.

At the time, I tweeted about a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States.

All hell broke loose. I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble,

than stay and bring them under the bus with me, or stay and self-censor. So now that I'm this side

of the parapet, I thought I should use my voice to find out what are the totemic and difficult taboo topics that we can't talk about.

I'll be interviewing artists, musicians, composers, comedians, everyone in the creative industries

to find out what indeed is the state of the arts.

And I hope you'll join me.

Today for the first episode, I'm joined live from New York City by conductor and pianist

Ignat Solzhenitsyn. Ignat is the conductor laureate of the chamber orchestra of Philadelphia

and the principal guest conductor of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. He's also an expert on the work of Alexander Schwarzenetzin and his father.

Ignat, welcome. Thank you so much for making the time. I'm genuinely thrilled. In anticipation of

this interview, I've been listening to your performances of Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven and

Prokofiev. Prokofiev was not someone I was familiar with before this, because the

classical world isn't a world I'm actually that familiar with. It's a world I'm hoping I might

learn a little bit about today. Wonderful, Winston, and so pleased to be with you. And conversely,

I hope to learn more about your part of the music world that

...