Compromise in Air, Yeltsin Takes Bow : Russia: About 10,000 march through Moscow and cheer president at a Red Square concert. Progress is reported toward an election accord.

Amid signs of compromise to end an explosive political showdown, thousands of Russians rallied to President Boris N. Yeltsin’s side Sunday, marching through Moscow and cheering his presence at an outdoor concert led by the country’s greatest living conductor.

The march by about 10,000 people was the biggest show of support for Yeltsin since he dissolved the conservative Parliament last Tuesday. It was also the campaign kickoff for the early parliamentary elections he decreed for December.

On a day of crumbling defiance by about 200 deputies entrenched at their barricaded Parliament headquarters with an equal number of paramilitary guards, music replaced harangue as the weapon of the day.

Russia is the country that produced Lenin and Tchaikovsky, a land where political upheavals often inspire great music. Sunday featured classical and rock, both orchestrated to Yeltsin’s advantage.

Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and its Choral Arts Society, conducted by world-renowned cellist and former Soviet dissident Mstislav Rostropovich, gave a free concert in Red Square, warming tens of thousands of music lovers on a freezing afternoon. The good spirit rubbed off on the 62-year-old president, who strolled out of the Kremlin to listen and shared in the applause.

Across town at the riverside Parliament building known as the White House, lawmakers addressing a crowd of 5,000 supporters were drowned out by recorded Russian rock blared from a speaker atop a bright yellow armored personnel carrier parked amid riot troopers encircling the place.

Amid the discord, there were steps toward compromise that might end the resistance to Yeltsin’s decrees, which mandate election of a new legislature Dec. 11-12 and of a president six months later.

Alexander V. Rutskoi, the man deputies named “acting president” when they voted to impeach Yeltsin, surrendered 76 assault rifles from Parliament’s defense forces to the government Sunday. Most of the weapons were sought for ballistics testing in the investigation of an assault on a military headquarters last Thursday in which a police inspector and an elderly bystander died.

Yeltsin’s legal adviser, Sergei M. Shakhrai, met all day in St. Petersburg with delegates from 40 of Russia’s 89 political subdivisions and agreed to hand Yeltsin their demands for simultaneous U.N.-supervised elections for president and a legislature by the end of this year.

Yeltsin did agree to set up a human rights commission to investigate complaints of dictatorial behavior and repression. In turn, the leaders of regions and autonomous republics dropped a threat to halt transport and tax payments to Moscow starting today.

Support for early elections of both branches at once is growing within the Yeltsin camp and among voters. In a survey of 1,200 Muscovites by the Postfactum News Agency last week, 74% favored it.

Sergei A. Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, said he is certain that such a formula would end the occupation of the White House. Filatov would not predict whether Yeltsin will accept it, but said he might be tempted to do so.

But Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, interviewed Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, repeated Yeltsin’s line against simultaneous elections, saying it would leave a dangerous power vacuum.

Yeltsin remains Russia’s most popular politician, and his control of the army, the bureaucracy and the media during the crisis appears to have boosted his standing in the polls.

But while Yeltsin remains firmly in charge, it is less clear whether elections could be carried out nationwide without some compromise on the timing. And both sides remain edgy about the threat of armed conflict.

Alarmed by reports that the dissident governor of Bryansk province was physically ousted from office by police, Rutskoi urged supporters Sunday to “fight to the death” if attacked.

Government security officials said Rutskoi’s guards still have 500 to 600 rifles stashed in the White House.

The guards went on full alert early today, grabbing rifles and gas masks and taking up combat posts. Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov told reporters he had information that riot police planned to storm the building.

But there was no sign of activity from police who have been ringing the building in the past week.

The last time Russians witnessed such a military showdown was in August, 1991, when Yeltsin and tens of thousands of democrats defended the White House against a hard-line Communist coup. Then, Rostropovich came home to perform as a cellist at the White House, the coup collapsed and the Soviet Union fell apart.

Rostropovich had been exiled in 1978 for defending author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, physicist Andrei D. Sakharov and other intellectuals persecuted by the Soviet regime. His citizenship was restored three years ago, but he lives in the United States.

Last week, with his friend Yeltsin in the Kremlin and anti-reform forces at the White House, the 66-year-old conductor was back again, saying he wanted to help the Russian people through their rocky transition to democracy.

As a chill wind whipped his white hair out like a pair of wings, the balding, bespectacled conductor led the orchestra in vigorous renditions of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Sergei Prokofiev’s “Alexander Nevsky.”

Yeltsin, accompanied by his defense minister and Moscow’s mayor, waved from the sidelines at the end. An announcer urged “faith in the president and in Russia’s future.” The crowd responded, “Hurrah! Hurrah!”

The crowd was far bigger than any rally on behalf of either side. Some in the audience climbed trees to see the stage. Many were weeping by the end.

“It gave me goose bumps,” said Taisia Kuznetsova. “Genius as he is, he simply cannot avoid being ‘infected’ by the political struggle. The current events serve as wonderful inspiration for him and make his soul soar when he performs.”

Sergei Kuznetsov and Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau and special correspondent Matt Bivens in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.