OPERA : Pride and Politics : Once creaky but always culturally correct, the Bolshoi is free to make changes and, in some productions, suffer the consequences

When the mighty Bolshoi Opera of Moscow first visited America in 1975, courtesy of an old visionary named Sol Hurok, the company offered New York some revelations.

Here was a genuine ensemble of world-class singing actors. Here was a company of well-trained, impassioned artists who shared common backgrounds and common goals.

Members of the Bolshoi represented a privileged elite, and when they reached the top, the system coddled them, after its fashion. They spent virtually their entire careers living together and working together. They had little choice in the matter.

Serving on a team that refines and polishes the same challenges in the same theater for decades, they performed with enlightened pride. They were civil servants selected to nurture a unique historic tradition predicated on a singular national style.

The Bolshoi Opera did not compete with the Vienna Staatsoper, La Scala or the Met. It did not have to. Segregated, if not protected from the decadent West by an iron curtain, the Bolshoi was an institution unto itself.

Back in 1975, it brought to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House a massively heroic “Boris Godunov” and a profoundly touching “Yevgeny Onegin.” Indicating its awareness of the 20th Century, the company also mustered some vintage Prokofiev.

The Bolshoi Opera had to follow numerous party lines. It dared not investigate genuinely progressive repertory--many officials regarded Prokofiev’s satirical “Igrok,” written in 1917, as a revolutionary choice--and it neither knew nor cared about modern attitudes toward stage direction. On all levels, the Bolshoi product had to be lavish, literal and culturally correct.

Not everyone could be happy within the confines of a system that restricted freedom and disdained invention. Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, cited artistic as well as political reasons for abandoning the Soviet Union. Still, many of their illustrious colleagues found it easy to accept the blinders that accompanied the automatic prestige and the generous support of the Bolshoi.

Then came glasnost and perestroika. The creaky operatic machine could never be quite the same again.

When the Bolshoi returned to the Met last month for an American visit that closes at Wolf Trap near Washington on Monday, the old regime was gone. Most of the familiar names had disappeared from the roster. The ancient attitudes were being challenged.

The changes, unfortunately, did not invariably represent improvements. A new production of “Yevgeny Onegin,” the first ventured by the Bolshoi since 1944, introduced musical mediocrity amid a quasi-modern theatrical muddle. Tchaikovsky’s “Orleanskaya Dyeva” (The Maid of Orleans), revealed an uneven score in a naive staging scheme that vacillated from oratorio to operatic charade to Christmas pageant.

A fanciful revival of “Mlada,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s complex, virtually unknown opera-ballet, offered opulent and exotic compensations. Even this worthy effort received derision from the now-hostile New York press.

The company was, no doubt, perplexed by its reception.

Alexander Lazarev, the 46-year-old artistic director and chief conductor of the Bolshoi Opera, arrives for a late breakfast in T-shirt and tennis shorts. He is jet-lagged and, despite an aggressively convivial veneer, angry.

The British impresario who set up the current Bolshoi tour had, he claims, moved the date of the New York opening without consulting him. Thus, the first week of the engagement here collided with Lazarev’s commitments in Duisburg (population 525,000) in what used to be West Germany. During his relatively frequent absences from Moscow, he happens to serve as music director of the Duisburger Sinfoniker, an arrangement that might have been unthinkable before perestroika .

While Lazarev was wielding his energetic baton for the final concerts of a Prokofiev festival in the distant Rhineland, conductors of lesser rank took his place with the Bolshoi-- his Bolshoi--at the Met.

“They are both good musicians,” he booms defensively through an excellent American interpreter. “I am grateful to them for helping out in a difficult situation. Nevertheless, they cannot present my concept. The stage director, the designer and I form an interpretive troika at the Bolshoi Theater. We work together to create a specific musical and theatrical perspective. It cannot be re-created by someone else.”

Fuat Mansurov, who substituted for Lazarev in “Onegin,” had conducted the opera during the 1975 tour. He comes from another tradition, it is suggested.

Lazarev lapses into instant English as he interrupts the suggestion. “He comes from another century.”

His frustration is not directed exclusively at his foreign agents. “We still have problems in Moscow,” he volunteers. “The last minister of culture had progressive ideas, so he was asked to leave. In the Soviet Union, they don’t seem to like people with progressive ideas, even now. When a person reaches a level of competence higher than that of the person above him, the more competent person has to be removed.”

With his career advancing rapidly in the West, he says he will stay at the Bolshoi only three more years. At present, he leads about 30 performances a year in a house divided by simultaneous obligations to opera and ballet.

“It does not matter where I will go after that,” he says. “I told the administration at the outset that I want to stage the great Russian masters--primarily Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. We will have done that. We have a lovely production of ‘The Golden Cockerel’ that I wanted to bring to New York, but the Met said it wasn’t interested. Too bad.

“I am happy that we can now return to Glinka’s original ‘A Life for the Czar,’ instead of the corruption called ‘Ivan Susanin.’ At the Bolshoi the romantic opera, written in 1836, had been turned into a revisionist saga in which Ivan and Lenin fight for the revolution of 1917.”

He mentions an obscure tenor who will undertake the stratospheric role of Sobinin in the Glinka opera. “His name,” according to the interpreter, “sounds like that of a famous Soviet scientist.”

“Not Soviet ,” corrects Lazarev. “ Russian .”

Contrary to some reports, Lazarev says he does not worry about losing his ensemble as more and more Bolshoi singers enter the world market.

“We don’t have the great stars, but we still have a team. We have no Domingo, no Pavarotti. That may be OK. In Moscow I saw Pavarotti in a telecast of ‘Trovatore’ from the Met. He is great singer. But it was just a concert in costume. It was bad. Everyone just stood and sang. The performance could have been assembled without rehearsals. Nothing we brought to New York could be assembled like that.

“Of course we don’t get everything right. Still, all the parts are interconnected. Nothing is left to chance with us.”

Lazarev was supposed to conduct a combined American and Soviet youth orchestra at Hollywood Bowl last year, but he never showed up.

“They came to me,” he explains, “and said, ‘Here’s your ticket. You are going to America tomorrow.’ I said ‘No.’ In the Soviet Union, they never like to let you know anything until the last minute.”

Lazarev does not hesitate to discuss subjects that his predecessors would have found taboo. He has devoted much of his career away from opera to modern music, much of it dangerously unpopular with the Kremlin. Once, he recalls, an intermediary from the ministry of culture advised him to cancel a concert devoted to such “decadent” avant-gardists as Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov. If he refused, his visa for a subsequent engagement in London might be mysteriously delayed.

He solved that problem, he says, by asking an older colleague to take over the potentially offensive concert. “My friend did it gladly because he felt he had nothing to lose. Nothing happened to him.”

He muses on his own words. “Nothing to lose. . . .”

“It is so fashionable today to champion Sakharov in Russia. Where were all those champions 10 years ago when he was in Gorky? I don’t want to say how much I suffered. I am not a martyr. The whole country lived in that atmosphere. One must keep a sense of humor.

“I respect Gorbachev. He is a man from the provinces, but he had the courage to open doors. He could have not begun the perestroika movement and stayed in power for 20 years. I respect his not leaving the party, although I left it. I have less respect for the so-called new democrats who tear up their membership when it is fashionable and easy.”

Like Yeltsin?

“Yes. Like Yeltsin.

“Gorbachev is getting a lot of trouble, but he was brave enough to take the plunge. Yeltsin never said he wanted perestroika. He came to Moscow and for a long time said, ‘Long live the Communist Party.’ ”

Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, once had been widely regarded as a crucial supporter of the arts in the Soviet Union.

“Sadly,” Lazarev comments, “that has ended. She tried at the beginning. I may be old-fashioned, but I still think the arts need patronage. I saw Raisa in that role for the Bolshoi. But after Yeltsin criticized her for getting involved in governmental matters, she decided to stay away.”

Lazarev, who soon will make his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, doesn’t think of himself as a specialist.

“I am primarily a conductor of good music,” he declares in rotund Russian.

What, no bad music?

“Well, sometimes bad music,” he replies in English, flashing a grudging grin.

Yevgeny Nesterenko is one of the few international stars who still sings regularly at the Bolshoi Theater. But, he admits, he now sings there “not so often.”

At 53, he is in demand in major houses throughout Europe, and he heads the voice department at the Moscow Conservatory. Two of the leading baritones and three of the basses on the U.S. tour are his students.

His New York stint consisted of the role of Prince Gremin in “Yevgeny Onegin,” a challenge that entails one magnificent basso-profondo aria amid 10 minutes of sympathetic posing. He laughs about Gremin. “The baritone who sings Onegin always hates me. He works like a devil all night long, and I walk on at the end, get the best music and often the biggest applause.”

He says in nearly perfect English that he likes to sing opera in the original language, but finds this “a big problem” in Moscow. “About 10 years ago, we began to try other languages. ‘Tosca,’ ‘Cavalleria,’ ‘Pagliacci’ in Italian. We do ‘Carmen’ sometimes in French--with the chorus always in Russian. It is very funny. The public is not used to this. They protest, they write letters. . . .”

He is eager to confirm that perestroika has changed the Bolshoi. “Now we are very free, with the repertory and with our financial business.”

He too cites the restoration of Glinka’s original “Life for the Czar.” “We could not have done this by ourselves in the past. It would have required endless discussions with the ministry of culture, with party officials, with the union of composers, with lots of people. Some operas were prepared for months or even a year, and then forbidden.”

Nesterenko says that production styles have not changed as much as the policies behind them. “It does not depend just on the government. It is also a matter of tradition, and of public taste.”

Travel habits have changed drastically and emphatically. “Now we are free to go wherever we like. Not only me. I am reasonably well known. Young singers as well. And, most important, when we go, we can take our families with us. At last I can take my wife and my son. It is very good.”

Although Russian singers frequently visit the West, it is still a one-way route as regards opera. “Our problem,” says Nesterenko, “is financial. We don’t have money to pay invited guests. No one wants rubles.”

In the past, all foreign travel for musicians had to be arranged through the government agency, Gosconcert . “It is a bad organization,” Nesterenko growls, “a little bit better now, perhaps, but I refuse to collaborate with them. The Bolshoi does its own booking at last, also for me.”

Trained in Leningrad, he says he is pleased that the city may soon be called St. Petersburg again. “The original name always is better.”

He thinks he knows why Russia has produced so many great, deep, resonant basses. “The low voice was always important in the church. The deacon was a bass.” He rumbles a fervent chant to illustrate the point.

The startled diners at a nearby table look up and smile. They mime applause.

When the Bolshoi played the Met in 1975, Makvala Kasrashvili, a young lirico-spinto from Tblisi, Georgia, seemed to be the most promising soprano in the company. She had inherited the roles vacated by Galina Vishnevskaya, and performed them with special allure and urgency.

Now she is the resident prima donna. She looks the part--in the last 16 years she has gained quite a lot of physical as well as vocal weight--but she doesn’t act it. She laughs a lot, chats candidly on a variety of topics with the help of the ubiquitous interpreter.

She is eager to talk of Vishnevskaya, who in darker times at the Bolshoi had been demoted from prima donna to non-person virtually over night.

“For me she was an example,” Kasrashvili says. “We stayed in contact after she left. It was dangerous. I had accompanied Rostropovich to the airport on his last day in Moscow. I always called them when I came to the West.

“That created some difficulties in my career. Soviet officials tried to stop me from singing on my own at the Met. I later saw letters that were sent from the Bolshoi Theater to Gosconcert saying, ‘How can you let her leave when you know she is friendly with Vishnevskaya?’

“The government often bestows honorary titles on its artists. I know that there were some that I had earned, that I deserved, that were never bestowed on me because of our relationship.

“Now, with perestroika , everything is OK.”

She says it as if she means it. But she has regrets.

“I had hoped to have more of an international career. That hope ended with the curtailment of relations between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in 1980. I lost the opportunity to travel to America for at least six years. I was here in 1979, then it was impossible.”

She laughs nervously, shrugs and voices an afterthought. “At least there was Covent Garden.”

Vladimir Kokonin has been general director of the Bolshoi Theater, the administrator in charge of both opera and ballet, since 1988. Before that, he held important posts at the ministry of culture and with Gosconcert . He beams, not incidentally, when he reports that “ Gosconcert is a now a poor institution, almost destitute.”

Earlier in his career, he played the clarinet in the Bolshoi pit. The experience, he says, gave him “a useful practical perspective.”

He is a busy man, a witty man and a candid realist. In the middle of the first week of performances in New York, he flew back to Moscow for one day to discuss impending, desperately needed renovations of the 2,200-seat Bolshoi Theater, renovations that will close the house in three years and move both opera and ballet to a 1,700-seat operetta theater.

He pauses when asked how long the repairs will take. “Maybe five or six years, maybe forever. One never knows these things in Russia.”

Although he defends the controversial new “Onegin,” he admits that Moscow audiences may not share his enthusiasm. “Our public is very conservative. They like everything old. Many people have never seen any other production.”

The time is “overripe,” he says, “for change.”

“We want to say goodby to the school of Soviet realism, and to reestablish links with the traditions that Soviet realism replaced. We also want to embrace more recent trends.”

One of the many problems facing him at the moment involves finding a way to keep the best singers and dancers at home.

“People can leave now,” he says. “It is calm. Defections are not necessary. But we don’t have binding contracts with our artists, as they do in the West. We cannot make them come back and fulfill their obligations to us.

“ Perestroika has changed the economics of the Bolshoi. The old system of management doesn’t work any more. It has to go. We are trying to find a way to function as Western companies function.”

The company seems to have entered the domain of the dirty capitalists. Kokonin objects to the label, if not the concept. “We don’t need ideological cliches any more,” he says.

“As usual,” he adds, “we do things the Russian way. We have done half of what needs to be done, but we haven’t figured out how to do the other half yet.”

The mighty Bolshoi, like the country it represents, finds itself in a precarious state of flux.