The Soviet Invasion: A Boston Diary

It was an unrealistic idea, a costly idea, a daring idea, a wonderful idea. In the infectious spirit of glasnost , representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to sponsor a pair of broad-ranging, reciprocal festivals of music and dance.

The Russians would come to Boston in the spring of ’88. The Americans would go to Moscow in the fall of ’89.

Significantly, this was not--repeat, not--planned as one of those glamorous programs in which one country sends the other its fanciest, most palatable, most commercially viable products. The repertory, for the most part, was to be risky, esoteric, modern, perhaps avant-garde.

Forget Tchaikovsky symphonies. Forget “Eugene Onegin.” Forget “Swan Lake.” Tradition was out. Adventure, one hoped, was in.

The project was to be called “Making Music Together.” It represented the mutual brainchild of Sarah Caldwell--Boston’s favorite, least practical, most embattled visionary--and Rodion Shchedrin--a powerful Soviet politico as well as versatile Soviet composer.

The dance events would evolve around Maya Plisetskaya. The fabled, strong-willed, quintessentially dramatic ballerina happens to be Shchedrin’s wife. She also happens to make life interesting--some would say difficult--these days for the official Muscovite regime of her nominal boss, Yuri Grigorovich.

She was conspicuously absent from the Bolshoi’s balleyhooed tour of the United States last year. But at 62, she continues to dance, continues to choreograph, continues to hypnotize the masses.

The Boston festival began on March 11 and ended somewhere around April 1. Events were still being added at press time. The $4.6-million cultural sprawl involved as many as 500 artists--American as well as Soviet--performing nearly 100 programs.

In addition to the ballet extravaganzas and large-scale concerts, there were chamber-music orgies, recitals, lectures, symposia, mime-theater demonstrations, educational efforts, choral and folk-music presentations. The Boston Symphony ventured several premieres. The Opera Company of Boston approximated the elaborate Bolshoi production of “Dead Souls,” Shchedrin’s celebrated adaptation of the Gogol novel. Boston University hosted contingents from the Moscow Conservatory. No single pair of eyes and ears could take in everything.

As is not unusual when it comes to the realization of Sarah Caldwell’s dreams, the festival nearly failed to materialize at the last minute. The impresaria-conductor apparently underestimated her expenses drastically, and overextended her creditors.

Complicating matters, the Soviets kept coming up with program and personnel surprises. The already complex logistics kept getting jogged and juggled by unexpected, ill-planned developments.

The embarrassing threat of cancellation loomed. Finally, the initial upbeat was made possible by desperate intervention from George Shultz at the State Department plus a partial financial rescue from the commonwealth instigated by Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis, not incidentally, showed up on the most glamorous occasion, a super-laivsh tribute to Plisetskaya. In a rather coy curtain speech, he mispronounced the ballerina’s name and confided that he planned to visit Moscow during the second installment of the festival. He declined to predict in what capacity he would be a fellow traveler.

The Boston festival turned out to be a triumph of good will, if not a triumph of good organization. An air of improvisation hung over some of the events, as did the threat of overexposure to imported novelty for its own sake.

The printed programs and ads represented triumphs of creative transliteration. Most intriguing, perhaps, was a composer identified as Gortel (Hertel?), who wrote the score for “Vain Precaution” (“Fille mal gardee”). Then there was an adagio from “Spartacus,” to be danced by the characters Egin (Aegina?) and Krass (Crassus?).

The public did not invariably know what was happening and where. Only a handful of listeners turned up to hear an almost-impromptu concert in which Gidon Kremer and friends played Shostakovich quartets. Friedrich Lips--probably the world’s leading exponent of the bayan (a colorful cousin of the accordion)--played a fascinating program of mock-electronic pieces, plus a dazzling arrangement of Figaro’s “Largo,” to an empty hall.

Many events had been scheduled for the reasonably intimate confines of the old Wilbur Theatre. These were moved, however, to the ornate ecclesiastical environs of the Tremont Baptist Temple when it was discovered that the Wilbur was a union house. Unions, we learn, are not useful to the itinerant needs of guests from the workers’ republic.

Ah, irony. . . .

When it could keep up, the public took the changes in stride. The audiences weren’t exactly enormous for the more obscure, out-of-the-way concerts. Still, enthusiasm ran high, the threat of aesthetic indigestion notwithstanding, and conviviality remained palpable.

There was nothing grim and forbidding about the atmosphere here. Americans and Russians chatted casually and easily, without the aid or intrusion of official interpreters. One had to pass through no security checks, no metal detectors, at the theater entrances. One saw no goons in bulky dark suits lurking in the corners.

Pickets also were conspicuously absent, although some polite, quiet demonstrators representing the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews occasionally handed out leaflets at the doors. In this context, their mild protest seemed mildly paradoxical. Plisetskaya, whose father was killed and whose mother imprisoned during the Stalinist purges, happens to be Jewish. So, among others, are the composer Alfred Schnittke, the critic/musicologist Lev Ginsburg, the designer Valery Levental and the legendary ballet master Asaf Messerer. All collected well-deserved laurels in Boston.

Glasnost was not just a pleasant cliche in this exercise of cultural exchange. Shchedrin, secretary of the composers’ union and thus a potential music czar in the U.S.S.R., composed a piece in honor the exiled Mstislav Rostropovich. It was performed on the same bill with settings of poems by Andrei Voznesensky--poems dedicated to the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, a defector, and to the novelist Boris Pasternak, a victim of persecution. Such freedoms would have been unthinkable just months ago.

Nor, in the bad old days, would present Russian citizens have mingled so freely with former Russian citizens. A pair of emigres who now live in Boston played on the same program with instrumental soloists from the Bolshoi orchestra and received warm applause from their colleagues. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who sprang to the West in 1974, made a more-than-symbolic appearance at the gala for Plisetskaya, at which warm greetings were also read from Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova. Some barriers really do seem to be breaking down.

The Soviets sent a large contingent of composers, old and young, progressive and regressive. We encountered--most notably at informal noon-time get-togethers in the decaying Opera House lobby--splashy sound-track scores, dutiful academic exercises, gimmicky theatrical experiments, even some genuine, forward-looking inspirations. The Russians, bless them, don’t yet seem to have discovered the simplistic rewards of minimalism. They seem to be dabbling, however, in just about everything else, and usually dabbling with skill.

Three personalities--all exponents of enlightened middle-age--dominated the field. Alfred Schnittke, 53, revealed a bold sense of drama, a wry wit, an iconoclastic spirit and a healthy disregard for symphonic convention in a number of disparate, inevitably engrossing works. Sofia Gubaidulina, 56, demonstrated a profound command of the mysterious and the introspective, not to mention a canny ear for subtle, piquant, mercurial sonorities. Shchedrin, 55, turned out to resemble the most accomplished of chameleons.

At a concert of the Festival Symphony Orchestra, an excellent ensemble combining Russian visitors with local musicians under the expert leadership of Dzhansug Kakhidze, Shchedrin introduced works of three very different Shchedrins. All seemed facile, none memorable.

“Stikhira” (Liturgical Hymn), the brand-new ode to Rostropovich, dealt in turgid neo-romantic platitudes. Its most interesting device required a vibrating mass of cellists to hum and bow at the same time.

The Second Piano Concerto, dedicated in 1967 to Plisetskaya, was tossed off brilliantly by Nikolai Petrov, second-prize winner at the Van Cliburn Competition in 1963. The second-hand score abandoned old-fashioned bravura and glib Prokofiev grotesquerie just in time for a forced-jazzy climax.

“Poetoria” (1968) fused the melodramatic recitations of Voznesensky with dissonant orchestral lamentations with folksy wails by the beloved Ludmila Zykina. All this was embellished--ask not why--with the mod distractions of a simplistic laser-light show.

Shchedrin proved far more persuasive, if not exactly a paragon of independence, in his opera, “Dead Souls.” He showed undoubted flair in adapting Gogol’s satirical tale of human greed, universal folly and the ultimate tax scam: a complex plot in which a con man purchases the names of departed serfs as collateral for bank loans.

The composer delineated each of the quaint, ultra-Russian characters with deft, individual strokes, mastered the art of the illustrative set piece with a sure hand, balanced caricature and banality really cleverly. If the result recalls nothing so much as sugar-watered Shostakovich, it at least has craft, clarity and vitality in its favor.

On this occasion, it also enjoyed the benefit of a marvelous performance. The production was modeled on the witty, imaginative Bolshoi staging of 1977, which had been the work of the ubiquitous Boris Pokrovsky. His name was oddly absent from the credits here, which listed Alexei Maslennikov, the fine character tenor, as stage director.

Valery Levental’s evocative, split-level sets attested to another aspect of Bostonian glasnost . The original designs were re-created, according to strange but standard Caldwell practice, in, of all places, Tel Aviv.

The large cast united Bolshoi stalwarts in central roles with nicely integrated American singers in subsidiary assignments. Igor Morozov swaggered with sleazy charm as the devious would-be hero and sang with a firm and pliant baritone. Boris Morozov blustered with splendid basso-profondo gravity as a pompous victim. Galina Borisova, a celebrated Carmen at the Bolshoi, delivered a delectably sniveling portrait of a miserly old man. Nina Gaponova as a feisty old widow proved that Mother Russia can still produce bona-fide gallon-jug contraltos. Maslennikov as a philosophical coachman performed with characteristic point and finesse.

Caldwell was to have conducted but, after an arm injury, passed the baton to the much-admired Kakhidze. At the final performance, last Sunday, Kakhidze himself stepped down in favor of his young American assistant, Theodore Ganger, who sustained balances, enforced tension and maintained propulsion very adroitly.

The inevitable supertitles, projected very high above the stage, proved distracting as always. In this esoteric case, however, they also proved useful.

The hottest ticket in the Hub admitted would-be aficionados to the most dubious attraction of the festival: the Bolshoi Ballet.

Despite a few familiar faces, this was not the stream-lined ensemble that Grigorovich brought to the States last summer. Grigorovich, in fact, became something of a non-person in Plisetskaya’s renegade version of the company. His name could not even be found in the program.

The bill on Saturday night a week ago was Plisetskaya’s own “Anna Karenina,” which dates back to 1972 and is familiar to American audiences via the film version. It is a vapid, impoverished, pretentious exercise in narrative naivete. Plisetskaya did create a rewarding vehicle for herself in the title role, but she reduced dance to pose while speaking a very limited, very trite choreographic language.

The ballet reduces Tolstoy’s probing, panoramic drama to a series of pretty pictures and push-button motives. It is silly, and it is unworthy. Shchedrin’s cranked-out score doesn’t help, and Levental’s decors obviously have seen better days.

The performance looked tired, dutiful, sloppy. Plisetskaya danced remarkably well for a woman of her age, but still did a disservice to incomparable memories. The once-supple back is stiff now. The passion is compromised by caution. The elevation is gone. The climaxes betray effort.

Under the circumstances, the legendary dramatic spirit could hardly soar. Her most memorable moment involved a hoary bit of stage trickery: death by strobe light.

It was sad.

Her pallid partners included Boris Yefimov as Vronsky (originally Alexander Godunov’s role), Victor Barykin as Karenin and Inna Petrova as Kitty (replacing the originally announced Nina Ananiashvili, who would have been wasted in the part anyway). Alexander Kopylov conducted the festival orchestra sympathetically, even con brio .

Plisetskaya dedicated the performance to Robert Joffrey, who had died on Friday. The following night, amid the brouhaha of her homage celebration, Joffrey’s name was heard again, this time under somewhat tasteless if not macabre conditions. Massachusetts’ First Lady read a congratulatory telegram reputedly bearing Joffrey’s signature. The message had been sent, it was explained, a few days earlier.

In general, the gala was a very mixed bag of tricks, tackily accompanied, with one notable exception, by recordings. Members of the second-string Bolshoi team stumbled through “Spring Waters” and excerpts from “Don Quixote” and “Spartacus.” (The same team will surround Plisetskaya in a one-night stand at Shrine Auditorium on April 24.) Terese Capucilli and Kenneth Topping, representing Martha Graham, enacted the anachronistic agonies of “Errand into the Maze” with taut bravura. Nina Ananiashvili and Andris Liepa, relative strangers from Grigorovich’s paradise, danced the “Raymonda” pas de deux very suavely.

Plisetskaya could be seen in film clips of her great days. On the screen she was the most vivacious and naughty of Kitris in “Don Quixote,” an odd abstraction in a Bach prelude as choreographed by Vasiliev and Kasatkina, a chic Isadora in the manner of Bejart and an outrageously pathetic Phrygia in Jakobson’s-- not Grigorovich’s--original “Spartacus.” On the stage she functioned bravely as the floral victim in Roland Petit’s kitschy “Rose malade” and as the tragic, rippling-rubber armed protagonist of Fokine’s “Dying Swan.”

She still has no serious competition as the terminal fowl. In response to mighty, sentimental, posy-strewn ovations, she died a second poetic time on this festive occasion.

It was that sort of an evening. But it did offer one extraordinarily poignant experience: Baryshnikov giving the performance of his life as Balanchine’s Apollo. The former hero of the Kirov obviously was out to prove a few things to his compatriots, and prove he did.

Muted in defiance, sensitive in nuance, fluid in phrasing, he demonstrated his mastery of a repertory denied him at home. He obviously exulted in showing off three extraordinary ballerinas whose careers he has cultivated at American Ballet Theatre: Susan Jaffe, Leslie Browne and Christine Dunham. With Robert Irving conducting an oddly amplified pit band, he reminded the celebrants in the Wang Center (a 4,000-seat movie palace) of the importance of live musical impulses.

Conspicuously refusing to translate his remarks into Russian, he read a number of congratulatory telegrams for Maya. Everyone, but everyone, called her Maya.

One came from that great balletomane who currently occupies the White House. Another came, we were told, from that other great balletomane--the balladeer with the old blue eyes. Frank Sinatra’s convenient tribute served as an excuse for Baryshnikov to show the Russians how a tuxedoed danseur noble glides and slides, with a little help from Twyla Tharp, through “One for My Baby.”

Everyone seemed to savor the culture shock.

The only undoubted fiasco of the festival involved a series of performances by the Moscow Theatre of Plastic Drama. Apologists claimed that the company had to improvise in an inappropriate hall, bereft of props and costumes that had somehow gotten lost in transit. Other observers insisted that the company was just plain bad, and that better theatrical trappings would not have helped.

Unfazed, local authorities instituted an inventive publicity campaign, and even found a positive, supportive newspaper quote for critical embellishment. The source of the quote, produced in an ad in the Boston Globe, was Pravda.

Now, that’s what we call making music together.