That Weil-Known Shirt Button

Beethoven had his 65-minute Ninth Symphony, Bach his two-hour B Minor Mass. But for Soviet Composer Aram Khachaturian, a three-minute piece of tuneless orchestral blooey has been enough to establish a worldwide reputation. Last week the man who wrote the Sabre Dance (1942) made his American debut, conducting the Washington National Symphony orchestra in a program of his own music. His reputation was enough to sell out the barnlike Constitution Hall (3,810 seats, plus 50 crammed onto the stage beside the orchestra) two nights in a row. The Sabre Dance was on the docket (as an encore), but most of the evening was devoted to larger works: the 1963 Concerto-Rhapsody for Cello and the 1943 Symphony No. 2.

A large, lumbering man whose amiable gracelessness extends both to his music and his conducting, Khachaturian, 64, is not exactly soured on the success of the Sabre Dance. "But it's like one button on my shirt," he says, "and I have many buttons." Curiously, the buttons do tend to resemble one another in all but size. The 48-minute Symphony, inspired by wartime patriotism, swoops from brassy fanfare to keening funeral march with a sure theatrical sense that never quite obscures its melodic poverty; the Concerto-Rhapsody covers much the same ground in about half the time, and was partially redeemed at the Washington performance by the dazzling virtuosity and superlative mugging of Soviet Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Unreached by the Breach. Naive and formless (although he was denounced in 1948 for his "bourgeois formalism") Khachaturian's large-scale compositions move ahead through a heady emotionalism, some of it inspired by the wailing, chantlike folk music of his native Armenia. The 20 years that separate the Symphony No. 2 from the Concerto-Rhapsody have seen some broadening of Soviet musical culture--the works of Bartok, Stravinsky and even Boulez have breached the curtain--but Khachaturian's style has deepened little.

Nevertheless, Khachaturian professes an interest in new music; several of his pupils at the Moscow Conservatory are, he says, "very modern." Their teacher's own prevailing conservatism has produced its own rewards: an eight-room apartment in Moscow (in a building where Shostakovich, Rostropovich and several other Soviet musicians also live), a summer home, another estate presented to him by the Armenian government, two cars, two chauffeurs and a large staff of servants. "I suppose that makes me a capitalist," he says, not at all ruefully.

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