AMERICAN CONDUCTS SOVIET ORCHESTRA IN MUSICAL DETENTE

They came--via Aeroflot jet, of course. They saw the challenges: language barriers, political tensions, electronic snafus, artistic differences.

But finally, American producer Lincoln Mayorga, conductor Lawrence Leighton Smith and their engineering team recorded: three discs’ worth of American and Russian music, performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and recorded in Moscow within a troika ride of the Kremlin.

Mayorga, working for Santa Barbara-based Sheffield Records, said the two-week recording session/cultural exchange last month was very successful and that the Soviet musicians, support crew and conductor--Dmitri Kitaenko--”bent over backward to make the whole thing work out.”

Smith, speaking from Louisville, Ky., where he is music director of the Louisville Orchestra, agreed.

“It was a fabulous experience,” he said. “From a musical point of view, it was heavenly--except you can’t talk about heaven in the Soviet Union, so I waited until I got back here to say so.”

Although Mayorga was concerned about repercussions from the arrest of American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, he was confident of his project’s safety.

“While we were planning this thing, Chernobyl and the bombing of Libya occurred, but they didn’t jeopardize the project,” Mayorga said. “I don’t think this affair will scuttle any of our projects.”

Indeed, throughout their Moscow stay, the Americans found the culture shock of working in the Soviet Union to be invigorating and frustrating by turns.

“We ran into unpleasantness and inefficiency at every turn outside of the studios,” Mayorga said via telephone from Upstate New York. “Getting things done or even set up was virtually impossible. We couldn’t even get messages taken for us at the hotel.”

“It was very . . . different,” Smith said. “Moscow seemed like any other huge European city at first. But then we started seeing lines in front of stores everywhere, people averting their eyes on the street--and the differences hit home. It was very exciting, but for all of that I’m very glad to be home.”

But inside the studio complex of the State Television and Radio Network, an atmosphere of musical detente prevailed. Mayorga and Smith praised the quality of the performances of the Soviet orchestra and also the cooperation and good humor of its members.

“It took us about a day and a half to get the studio to sound right,” Mayorga said, “but throughout the ordeal the musicians were happy to accommodate our ‘fussiness.’ And a bunch of people from the state radio and from Melodiya (the Soviet state record label) kept popping by to check out our equipment and to make suggestions. They couldn’t have been more helpful--but it did get a little close in the control room after a while.”

“They are really a world-class ensemble,” Smith said. “And their conductor, Kitaenko, is a superb musician. He took to the American repertoire right away, though he had never heard the music before.” Smith conducted the Soviet half of the sessions’ repertory, adding that the experience was “much like carrying coal to Newcastle, but enjoyable nonetheless.”

Much of the American repertory recorded by the orchestra under the baton of Kitaenko had not been heard in the Soviet Union, but Mayorga said the musicians “took to the Copland (the Appalachian Spring suite) like ducks to water.”

“That really surprised Larry (Smith) and I, because the rhythms and meters are very idiomatically American,” Mayorga said. “In fact, we finished the American music segment of the recording schedule ahead of time. The only real problem we had was with intonation; they’re not as careful about it as American orchestras tend to be. But there were no ego problems associated with the retakes--they’d usually just grin and play it again.”

The results on the recordings made during the historic session--the first done with an American conductor directing a Soviet orchestra--aren’t in yet; the raw master tapes have yet to be edited and mastered here in Los Angeles. But co-producer Doug Sax, working at Mastering Lab in Hollywood, said he was impressed with the tapes, shipped to him from Moscow.

“These recordings will probably mark the first time Americans will really get to hear what a Soviet orchestra sounds like,” Sax said, “because, frankly, the Melodiya engineers used way too many mikes and had a funny idea of what dynamic range meant.” A large number of Melodiya recordings were distributed in the United States during the 1970s by Angel Records, but many have gone out of print.

Yet Sax, like his colleagues, was more excited by the cross-cultural evidence the recording sessions turned up.

“The most interesting thing to me is hearing how this Russian orchestra relates to the American music they’re playing; they’re really being introduced to it for the first time,” Sax said. “There was a real freshness and enthusiasm to their performances, and that really comes across on the recordings I’ve heard so far.”

For the Americans in Moscow, an impromptu jam session that broke out after the orchestra’s broadcast concert on Aug. 20 neatly summed up the heady musical atmosphere.

“I was just noodling on the piano, doing a little practicing, when (engineer) Stan Ricker borrowed a stand-up bass and started giving me a bass line,” said Mayorga, who is also a concert pianist. “And then two members of the orchestra--the second French horn and a percussionist--walked over and started in too. In fact, the horn player is noted in the Soviet Union as a jazz improviser, and he was the one calling out the tunes!” Smith added: “Music represented as a universal language has become a cliche, but the spontaneity with which that jam happened puts the lie to the cliche. When I was conducting the orchestra, after a while we didn’t even need our translator to communicate with each other. It was all there--desire for understanding, for peace and for good music--without one word.”