High Spirits, Dead Souls

By Michael Walsh

One of the bracing side effects of the cultural glasnost now under way between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is the realization that Soviet musicians are not all ten feet tall. Exposed to only the best performers and the beneficiaries of some spectacular defections, many Americans had come to believe that the Soviet artist was superior to his Western counterpart. Since the latest round of emigration and exchange, epitomized by Vladimir Horowitz's triumphant return to his homeland two years ago, the inordinate fear of Communist musical supremacy has waned as familiarity has grown and widened. Ten feet tall? Five foot eight may be closer to the mark.

As proof, consider "Making Music Together," an ambitious three-week festival currently thriving in Boston. Conceived jointly by Sarah Caldwell, the visionary leader of the Opera Company of Boston, and Russian Composer Rodion Shchedrin, the $4.6 million event features some 500 Soviet and American musicians, composers and dancers in an exhaustive survey of contemporary Soviet musical thinking. (Next year Caldwell & Co. will journey to Moscow for a reciprocal visit.) Despite an improvisatory, hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show atmosphere, the festival offers an unparalleled opportunity to hear and assess the state of new Soviet music and performance.

Glasnost has arrived not a minute too soon. The vigorous turmoil that has marked Western composition for the past two decades has left hardly a scratch across the dutiful Russian visage. True, there have been a few dated "experimental" pieces of the wail-and-swoop school that, if expressed orthographically, would look like ! cents* ! and to which the audience reaction is generally zzzzzzz, and some younger Soviet composers have flirted with newer techniques, such as minimalism. But most of the music heard last week mines the same tractor-factory-and-singing-peasant vein that the Soviets have been exploring for the past 40 years.

This state of affairs is not surprising, given the hostility to innovation that has marked the long reign of conservative Composer Tikhon Khrennikov, 74, since 1948 the iron chancellor of the state Composers Union. The tough-minded, politically agile Stalinist, who was a point man for the infamous Resolution of 1948 that ripped Shostakovich and Prokofiev for modernism, Khrennikov brought a generation of composers to heel in the name of socialist realism.

Still, his rigidity seems to be fading. The Boston visitors include Progressives Alfred Schnittke, 53, and Sofia Gubaidulina, 56, now recognized as two of the Soviet Union's best composers. And, of course, there is Shchedrin, favored to succeed Khrennikov someday as a culture czar, who was represented by his new opera Dead Souls. A licensed radical who sacrificed his genuine talent for the status of a pampered house pet, Shchedrin once wrote sparklers like the Carmen Suite, a vibrant 1967 gloss on Bizet that will be danced later this month by his wife Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. Now, perhaps metaphorically, he writes Dead Souls.

Based on the novel by Gogol, the opera has all the marks of a major work except memorable music. Gogol's irresistible tale of the scheming Chichikov (the splendid high baritone Igor Morozov), who would "buy" dead serfs in order to build a bogus prosperity on their collateral, holds the stage splendidly. The handsome duplex set by Designer Valery Levental is a sky- above, mudslinging-below construct. But beyond the "aria portraits" that graphically limn each of the principal characters, Dead Souls contains every cliche in the state manual, including the obligatory lament for the suffering people that has been a staple at least since Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. The opera has just enough technique to work and not enough heart to make anyone care.

The festival offers some discoveries, however. Leningrad Composer Andrei Petrov's 1980 Violin Concerto is a sturdy showpiece that picks up momentum from its opening recitative to its blazing vivo finale; it got an otherworldly performance from Soloist Sergei Stadler, a baby-faced firebrand who shared first prize in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition with Viktoria Mullova. Sergei Slonimsky's sprightly two-minute Novgorod Dance -- hellzapoppin', cossack- style, ending with the clarinetist, trombonist, cellist, pianist and conductor all merrily hoofing it around the stage -- bespeaks a composer with both an ear and a sense of humor. Best of all is Schnittke's silvery Three Scenes for Soprano and Chamber Ensemble (1981), a theater piece for percussionists, soprano and conductor that apes a funeral procession, ending with a solemn cortege in which the vibraphone is held aloft like a coffin.

It is easy to read the symbolism here, as well as in Giya Kancheli's bombastic Symphony No. 6, in which a delicate theme flowers briefly, then is brutally crushed by the massed fortissimos of the full orchestra. Soviet music tends to have a program, even when it is hidden; enforced orthodoxy has driven content underground. One of the goals of musical glasnost should be to bring it to the surface again. Historically, few national schools are as expressive as the Russian, and few have more to be expressive about. Open to new sounds and new techniques, Soviet music may once again grow in stature.