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.