Music Society Offers Preview of Soviet Artists

While mayor Maureen O’Connor has employed her considerable influence to bring a festival of Russian visual and performing arts to the city in 1989, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society clearly beat the globe-trotting mayor to the punch.

Last year, the enterprising La Jollans presented the Moscow Virtuosi at Symphony Hall, and this Sunday they are sponsoring a concert by another Moscow orchestra, the State Symphony of the U.S.S.R., at Civic Theatre.

Because of the perennial chill in U.S.-Soviet relations, the State Symphony, which was formed in 1936, has rarely visited these shores. The orchestra made a single visit to the East Coast in 1960, but it was not until the cultural accords of the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev Geneva summit that the orchestra began pursuing in earnest its contacts with the West. The current tour, which marks the orchestra’s West Coast debut, is its second in as many years.

This May in Moscow, while the American and Soviet heads of state conferred, the spirit of glasnost worked another miracle. In a historic joint concert held outdoors in Moscow’s Gorky Park, 100 members of the State Symphony combined with 100 members of the New York Philharmonic, which was just completing its Soviet tour, in a concert of Shostakovich and Berlioz.

For the last 23 years, Soviet composer and conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov has been the State Symphony’s music director. Though there is no doubt that Svetlanov has been politically astute--he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1972--he has also championed the music of fellow composers who did not enjoy a similar level of official approval. In times when 12-tone compositions were still considered too decadent for the official Soviet Realist artistic codes, Svetlanov conducted some of these pieces by adventurous Soviet composers. He also programmed the later works of Stravinsky before the expatriate Russian composer was officially “rehabilitated” by the Soviet musical establishment.

At this stage of his career, Svetlanov sees his mission as presenting rarely performed works by Russian and Soviet composers to his new audiences outside the Soviet Union.

“We very badly know each other’s contemporary music,” explained Svetlanov through his interpreter in a phone interview during the orchestra’s recent stop in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“And this problem is not limited to the younger composers. Let me remind you that it was not always this way. During the war, when we were fighting against fascism, at that time we played American music, and Americans played Russian music. Now we have to find out about each other’s music all over again.”

In fact, on July 3, 1945, the State Symphony played an all-American concert at home that featured pieces by George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, Roy Harris and Wallingford Riegger.

Svetlanov was willing to give his brand of music diplomacy high marks, even though he agreed that it took political negotiations at the 1985 summit conference to allow his orchestra to visit North America again.

“I have always considered that real art--great art--does more than diplomacy. Even the best diplomats, their achievements in making better relationships--they come and they go. By comparison, music gives results more immediately than does diplomacy.”

In spite of the pleas from impresarios in the West who regularly implore Svetlanov to bring easy-to-sell Tchaikovsky programs, the intrepid music director holds to his convictions.

“In 1986, a Soviet orchestra was invited to Australia for the first time. In working out the program, we had to argue long and hard to keep Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony and Shostakovich’s Fifth on the program. And what happened? It was precisely for these concerts that the tickets were sold out in no time, after which the Australian impresarios acknowledged that we had been right and gave us carte blanche to choose the repertoire next time we go on tour there in 1989.”

Svetlanov’s San Diego program will include Scriabin’s seldom played Second Symphony and the more popular showpiece, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with soloist Lubov Timofeeva. For this North American tour, Svetlanov has included one of his own compositions, although San Diegans will not be hearing it. In justifying this seeming indulgence, he invoked the example of another conductor-composer.

“I’ve included my Second Rhapsody on this tour only because it is my 60th birthday (Sept. 6). I noticed that Leonard Bernstein, who is celebrating his 70th birthday, has been doing a lot of his own works this year.”

Svetlanov quickly added that he tried not to abuse this option as the State Symphony’s music director.

“As a conductor for the last 23 years, it has been much easier to perform my own works, although I must say that I try not to use the opportunity too often. But, for composers in general, it is a global problem. There are too many (new) composers, and the public loves and wants to hear things familiar to them.”