Formed in 1990 by Mikhail Pletnev, the pianist and conductor, it proudly asserted its status as the country's first orchestra not to be sponsored by the government.
But then he has more than earned the right to assert his status as a true master.
He was almost pathological in asserting his status, and there seems barely a moment in these pages when he isn't being a gigantic nuisance.
For any of us to claim that mantle and assert that status is to accept first and foremost that our actions have consequences for others beyond our borders.
But it's also, I believe, because we have a deep-rooted urge to assert our status by killing them and owning their body parts.
You might have imagined that there were now plenty of alternative means of asserting our status and persuading ourselves of our own value, but traits that resonate with our evolutionary past – our ghost psyche – die hard.
To assert his status, the tribe's chief picks up one of the celebrated anthropologist's pads and starts scribbling on it, to impress his subjects with his superiority.
There's the lovesick R. & B. singer who "drunk-texts J. Lo," the snarling and vindictive rapper asserting his status ("I know I said I'm top five, but I'm top two"), the hitmaker and the moody experimentalist, the ruthless networker who can bring Kanye West out of exile for a redemptive duet.
When Christian Dior tried to assert the status quo by showing below-the-knee designs in his 1966 autumn/winter collection, a small group calling themselves the British Society for the Advancement of the Miniskirt protested outside his London HQ, holding placards defending their right to show a leg.
As someone who graduated from Yale during the first half of the last century, I believe that I can say with some authority that it is not altogether true that, as your article asserts, social status at Yale, Harvard and Princeton in those days was determined by membership in certain private clubs and secret societies.
Front-page coverage and heated morning radio discussions asked how Professor Chomsky, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could pose a risk to Israel and how a country that frequently asserts its status as a robust democracy could keep out people whose views it found offensive.
