Conductor Finds <i> Perestroika </i> Plays Well for Career

Soviet conductor Vassili Sinaisky may be forgiven if his composure appears slightly ruffled. Just two weeks ago, he was alerted that he would be making his American debut with the San Diego Symphony, taking the place of the ailing Valery Gergiev. Then, a week ago, he learned that he had been appointed the new music director of one of Moscow’s two State Symphony Orchestras.

On Tuesday, his first full day in America, the 41-year-old conductor gave up most of an already-brief lunch hour sandwiched between two long rehearsals for an interview. In the role of interpreterr was San Diego Symphony concertmaster Igor Gruppman, a Russian emigre several years Sinaisky’s junior who will be playing the solo in Glazunov’s Violin Concerto tonight under Sinaisky’s direction.

The two musicians attended the same music conservatory in Leningrad, where each met his future wife, so, although they had met only the evening before at the airport, they displayed the camaraderie of two old friends at a reunion.

For Sinaisky, the salutary breezes of perestroika have brought him back from musical exile in Latvia and put his career back on the fast track.

“After 12 years of being the music director of the Latvian Radio and Television Symphony in Riga, Latvia, it meant I was given a chance to assume a post with the Bolshoi Opera. And now I have my own orchestra. I can breathe now!” Sinaisky said.

“Before perestroika , the music that was performed was only by party composers and people in power, people approved by the composers’ union,” he said. “Now that censorship does not exist at all, and we can perform a broad spectrum of music. Ultramodern pieces--even electronic music--are being performed, although not necessarily of the highest quality.”

Although contemporary Western music has not yet achieved the status of American jazz and blue jeans, it is the newest fad in the Soviet Union.

“Only 10 days ago, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Requiem’ was played in Moscow by the State Symphony Orchestra,” Sinaisky said. “Over the last five years, the government’s planning committees have begun to promote contemporary Soviet and Western music on a large scale. There have several new festivals devoted exclusively to contemporary music. Last year one took place in Leningrad. They performed some 300 contemporary works in two weeks!”

As with most of the changes in contemporary Soviet life, Mikhail Gorbachev has been the catalyst for music’s renewed importance. According to Sinaisky, after the Soviet leader visited the finals of the most recent Tchaikovsky Competition, his subordinates became converted to regular concert-goers.

“That set the pace,” Sinaisky said. “Now it is very fashionable for Soviet leaders to come to the concert and invite visiting officials from other countries.”

When then-President Reagan met with Gorbachev in Moscow, Sinaisky was on the podium the night the two world leaders attended the symphony at the Bolshoi Theatre.

Sinaisky said he has heard of both the upcoming San Diego Soviet Arts Festival and Seattle’s 1990 Soviet festival. Since he has just achieved the status of a Soviet conductor with an international agent, he has not been approached to perform at either.

“Any Soviet conductor would be happy to participate,” he said.

Tonight’s San Diego Symphony concert of Borodin’s Overture to “Prince Igor,” Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony and the Glazunov Violin Concert marks Sinaisky’s American debut. However, he has performed in this hemisphere before. In the late 1970s, he conducted several times in Cuba. His recollections about that experience, however, had more to do with climate than with musical interpretation.

“We were in Havana, and it was very hot. I was conducting a Brahms symphony, and the heat was 102 degrees . . . . Although the whole orchestra was allowed to take their jackets off, I had to keep tails on for the whole concert.”

The first big break in Sinaisky’s career came in 1973, when he won first prize in the Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition, the first Soviet conductor to win that prize. In spite of the professional importance of the award, Sinaisky remains cautious about competitions when it comes to his 15-year-old son, a budding pianist. When asked if his son is preparing for the next Tchaikovsky Competition, Sinaisky said, “No, not yet,” and stressed that he and his wife are trying not to apply undue pressure.