Crescendo of Memories in Moscow : Music: It was a homecoming of sorts for many members of the Israel Philharmonic, on its first visit ever to the Soviet Union.

Israeli composer Mark Kopyman’s blue eyes twinkled Thursday with an excitement he could not contain as he described what he called “a meeting with my past.”

“Last night I saw the apartment off Gorky Street where I first lived with my wife, just after we were married,” Kopyman said with a broad grin. “And the fruit stand where we used to shop--it’s there too.”

The Israel Philharmonic performed in the Soviet Union for the first time Thursday, but it was nevertheless a homecoming of sorts. A quarter of the orchestra’s 112 members are Soviet emigres, and some were returning to their childhood home for the first time in decades.

It is through their music that they are likely to best express the joy their return has awakened, and as the orchestra appears in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga, the Latvian capital, over the week ahead, an observer senses a deep emotionalism.

Kopyman, 60, who was born in the Ukraine, has been gone for 18 years. He is back to hear his composition “Memory” performed in the country that was, in many ways, the source of his artistry.

“I am proud to represent Israeli music,” he said, “but it is a little strange that here I will be introduced as an Israeli composer, not a Soviet.”

Kopyman’s music has been performed all over the world by the Israel Philharmonic, but the Soviet concerts hold an unmatched significance for him. In the audiences, he said, will be old school chums whose faces are now wrinkled with age, second cousins he recalls only from faded black-and-white photographs, scores of old comrades who are now, like him, balding and with grandchildren.

“When my music is performed, it will be a little bit like a school exam,” he said. “My old friends will be there, and I must demonstrate what I have been doing for these past 20 years, what I have accomplished.”

But before the first “exam,” Thursday night in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall, Kopyman and other Soviet emigres were mainly interested in seeing old friends and sights, sharing memories and posing for a group photograph on Red Square, which many thought they would never see again.

The Soviet Union, among the first countries to recognize Israel upon its creation in 1948, severed its ties to the Jewish state after Israel occupied Arab lands following the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Soviet Union is still the main supplier of weapons to Israel’s Arab enemies, but it has resumed relations with Israel, on a de facto basis, and this has enabled the orchestra to make the tour.

Most of the Soviet emigres in the orchestra say it was the lack of creative freedom they felt in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s that drove them to leave--and has cost this country some of its finest artists.

“A quarter of the orchestra won’t need interpreters, and that gives the Russians something to think about,” said Zubin Mehta, the Israel Philharmonic’s music director, before the tour began.

First cellist Marcel Bergman, 40, left a dozen years ago in search of artistic freedom. He has made a life for himself so distant from the one he lived here that, he said, he has lost the once-vivid memory of himself as a young man living in the Ukrainian city of Lvov and studying music in Leningrad, the capital of the Russian Revolution.

“I don’t feel I once belonged here,” he said over breakfast at the Rossiya Hotel. “I don’t feel a part of it at all.”

Bergman now lives in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. He has an Israeli wife and they have an Israeli child and a second on the way.

“I left for pragmatic reasons, not emotional ones,” he said. “I simply wanted my musical career to go further than I thought it could here. I came to realize that Israel was my real home. But I am still surprised that I feel so emotionless here. To me everything looks gloomy and gray--the buildings, the streets, the people.”

Paya Yussim, a 43-year-old violinist from Riga, said she too was a little disappointed to see that Moscow looking “so much darker than I had remembered” after 23 years in warm and sunny Israel.

But her homecoming was more emotional than Bergman’s. She was met at the airport here by Vladimir Dukats, a cousin who was her closest childhood friend.

“I was so excited I was sweating,” Dukats recalled. “I wondered whether we would feel the same closeness after all these years. But as soon as I saw her, there was no question. We have something eternal.”

The two cousins don’t know when or if they will see each other again once the tour ends, on Thursday. So they hope to make the most of it, spending all the time they can together.

For Yussim, the reunion is bittersweet, tinged with the sense that she has become a far different person since she last saw her cousin and the country of her birth.

“I was 20 years old when I left, and now I have a son who is 20,” she said.

“It seems so long since I lived here. I am an Israeli, and I am proud to be an Israeli, but this is a piece of my life. And that is why it is so exciting to be performing here.”