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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.