Mission from Moscow

After four years of vigorous "cultural exchange." U.S. audiences last week had their first chance to hear a Russian symphony orchestra and to compare it with what they know at home. Occasion: the start in Manhattan of a 20-city tour by the Moscow State Symphony, one of Russia's two major symphony orchestras (the other: Leningrad's Philharmonic).

Conditions for judging the Moscow players were not ideal: at the insistence of Impresario Sol Hurok, the Russians were offering a straight Tchaikovsky repertory during the first two weeks of their stay, with no other classics and no modern works. (Muttered Permanent Conductor Konstantin Ivanov, who wanted to play more Beethoven: "I suppose King Hurok knows best.") Under the 52-year-old Ivanov and 45-year-old Kiril Kondrashin. one of Russia's most active guest conductors, the 106-man Moscow symphony displayed some solid virtues and some marked weaknesses. The Russians attacked their Tchaikovsky less fiercely than many U.S. orchestras, and the old tub thumpers emerged at times with a lacy lightness lost in many a U.S. concert hall.

The Moscow strings had a fine singing quality, and the brass was splendidly clear, but the wood winds sounded constricted and nasal. In general, the orchestra lacked the absolute authority that distinguishes a great orchestra from a merely good one; it also made plain why U.S. symphony orchestras have been so wildly cheered in Russia.

The real triumph for this group from the land of collectivism was not the orchestra's collective accomplishment but the individual performances of several great soloists. Pianist Emil Gilels, well known to U.S. audiences (TIME, Oct. 17. 1955) was in fine bravura form in Tchaikovsky's familiar Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra. Even more enthusiastically received were two newcomers:

Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, 33, pretty brunette star of the Bolshoi Opera, who sang selections from two Tchaikovsky operas, Eugen One gin and Queen of Spades. She revealed a voice of impressive range and size, smooth as silk in its vocal tracery, superbly responsive to every dramatic mood. Handsomely sheathed in a low-cut hourglass gown, but wearing no makeup ("Lipstick is unbecoming to me''), Soprano Vishnevskaya showed clearly why she is a Russian favorite. Her high spirits may stem from the fact that she started not in grand opera but in musical comedy. She sang at the Leningrad Operetta Theater during the war, sandwiching performances between stints of rubble clearing in the streets. In 1952 she graduated to the Bolshoi Opera, is now preparing the leading role in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Married to famed Russian Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Soprano Vishnevskaya has two daughters, lives comfortably in a six-room Moscow apartment, draws a top Soviet artist's salary of $1,500 a month.

Cellist Daniel Shafran, 36, who provided one of the memorable performances heard at Carnegie Hall in recent years. Playing a 1630 Amati cello (bought for him by the state when he was 14), Shafran sailed through Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme with superb technical accuracy and a flooding warmth of feeling. Cradling the cello in long, slender arms, occasionally resting his cheek against it as though it were a pillow, he drew forth long, buttery strands of sound, executed devilishly difficult and rapid runs with uncanny ease, clouted out loud pizzicato chords with minuscule movements of arm and wrist. Virtuoso Shafran started studying the cello when he was eight, made his first big splash at eleven playing with the Leningrad Philharmonic. His repertory includes the predictable Tchaikovsky, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Schumann, Schubert and Bach, but he also plays more esoteric music--early Italian and German works. As the spatulate, bulbous fingertips on his left hand indicate, Cellist Shafran practices up to seven hours a day to live up to his title: "Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic."

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