THE MOSCOW SESSIONS

Last fall, The Times carried a couple of news stories about a joint U.S.-Soviet recording project in Moscow initiated by Sheffield Lab, the Santa Barbara-based audiophile label.

The orchestra involved was the Moscow Philharmonic, with its music director, Dmitri Kitayenko, hardly a household name beyond his native confines, sharing the programs with American conductor Lawrence Leighton Smith, highly respected among his fellow musicians and in academic circles but unfamiliar to a more general public except in Kentucky, where he serves as music director of the Louisville Symphony, and Santa Barbara, where he heads the Music Academy of the West.

Interestingly, Kitayenko wound up leading the American works, none part of the orchestra’s or the conductor’s repertory. Smith led the Soviet ones, most of them core components of the international repertory and staples of the Moscow Philharmonic diet.

While the extra-musical connotations of such an encounter are unavoidable, the privately financed “Moscow Sessions” also document some music-making that is decidedly out of the ordinary in spite of the hyper-familiarity of most of the chosen repertory.

Without intending to minimize the contributions of the two savvy and seasoned conductors involved, or the sterling accomplishments of the Sheffield engineers, who brought along their own equipment to produce three of the warmest, most natural-sounding CDs imaginable, the heroes of the occasion are the members of the Moscow Philharmonic.

What a joy to hear a genuinely distinctive-sounding orchestra, with clearly defined national characteristics, in an era when most of the major ensembles are pretty much interchangeable in terms of their basic sound quality. Relative isolation from foreign influence has its rewards.

Listen, for example, to the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony (Sheffield 25), with its wa-wa vibrato-ing horn solo (two notes for the price of every one notated) and the juicy, dense oboe tone; or the ominously dark and woody clarinets, the piercing trumpet and sweetly tremulous solo violin in Shostakovich’s First Symphony (Sheffield 26).

Then too the lush, expressively sliding massed Moscow strings everywhere on these three discs. And marvel at the gorgeous pianissimos they produce with comparable frequency. The open-toned Moscow trumpets and trombones, on the other hand, sound like a bunch of happy kids--supremely skilled ones, mind you--at a raucous party.

If a single CD from among these three had to be selected, the choice would fall on Sheffield 26, whose principal component is the aforementioned Shostakovich First, led with terrific panache and rhythmic intensity by Smith, and played with thrilling virtuosity. The two appealing (and rather out of fashion) American works on this disc, both under Kitayenko, are the “Incredible Flutist” ballet music of Walter Piston and Samuel Barber’s First Essay.

While one is hardly accustomed to so lush a sound as that accorded Piston here, the mainstream, early-20th-Century-European influences on both his and Barber’s work render them comfortably international in style. Nor, on the third disc (Sheffield 27), is one surprised at the Soviets’ affinity for “The White Peacock” by Griffes: French music by an American. In every instance, Kitayenko’s interpretation is forthright and efficient, his orchestra superbly responsive.

The Tchaikovsky Fifth shares a disc with a blisteringly paced “Russlan and Ludmilla” Overture of Glinka and an atmospheric “Khovanshchina” Prelude of Mussorgsky. What is clear about the results is that Smith and his orchestra are thoroughly in agreement as to how the piece should go and that it goes smartly, with the previously noted singularities of Soviet instrumental tone at their most charmingly appropriate.

The Smith-Moscow collaboration certainly offers more vital Tchaikovsky than can be heard from a couple of International Stars of the Baton in their recent CD editions of the same work: the wan, underemphatic job by Andre Previn and Royal Philharmonic (Telarc 80107), and the tough, intractable one by Riccardo Muti and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Angel 45859).

What may be considered a cultural gap of sorts can be perceived in the Kitayenko-Moscow Philharmonic playing of the wide-open-spaces music, particularly the opening, of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” (also on Sheffield 27), which emerges rhythmically rigid and lacking in dynamic subtlety. And whereas the blasting Moscow brasses lend flavor to the Soviet works, the accent they provide here is alien to the music.

“The Unanswered Question” of Charles Ives is, however, a piece without obvious nationality. Rather, it is music with dark, universal implications. The Soviet performers’ rapt, tensely quiet reading is touchingly to the Ivesian point.