Soviet Music From the Kirov Gives Festival a Rousing Start

The music in Avery Fisher Hall Monday night was loud, brash and patriotic. The applause was hugely enthusiastic. It was the first night of Lincoln Center Festival 96, a new festival and finally one in America on the scale of the big European summer festivals. And say this for John Rockwell, the former New York Times and Los Angeles Times music critic making his debut as a festival director--people will be arguing about the opening-night program by the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus for a long time. The patriotism was Russian and it was toasted with a huge Soviet cocktail.

But it is also the nature of this far-flung three-week event--which tries to simultaneously capture the tumble of New York life and bring to it something entirely new--that only some people will be talking about the Kirov. Opening night choices also included a tribute to past New York composers associated with Lincoln Center (Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and William Schuman), choreographer Maguy Marin’s deconstructivist “Coppelia” from Lyons, water puppets from Vietnam and gospel music from Harlem.

The Kirov program, the first of four for the festival (and all different, but for one work, from the programs that the Kirov will bring to Hollywood Bowl next week), was bold and extraordinary. It asked us to open our minds to music that politics usually closes them to; it asks us to be tolerant of works written under intolerant conditions. Specifically, it included official Soviet music written by Shostakovich and Prokofiev to appease and glorify a treacherous government.

Neither Shostakovich’s splashy Symphony No. 11 (a graphic representation of events in 1905 that led to the Russian Revolution) nor Prokofiev’s grandiloquent “Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution” (with texts by Marx, Lenin and Stalin) are great works. But they are defensible and often thrilling works by great composers, and they got irresistibly rousing performances that succeeded in making an audience put art before politics, which is no small accomplishment in New York.

Part of what made these performances, under the Kirov’s mesmerizing music director, Valery Gergiev, important and fascinating was the complex and profound ironies involved. The first irony is the fact that these performances would never have taken place if the Soviets had stayed in power. Gergiev’s appointment as artistic director of the Kirov was an early testing of glasnost, given that he was selected by members of the company in 1988 over the government’s official appointee. Moreover, Gergiev has made the Kirov the most vital arts organization in Russia by taking advantage of free enterprise, keeping the company afloat by tirelessly touring and selling it around the globe.

A second irony is that artistic freedom has inspired Gergiev to take a very deep and unbiased look at Russia’s musical heritage, which means reviving all kinds of works, whatever their political genesis. A third and revelatory irony is that performing works written under immoral conditions can actually enhance our understanding of the human condition. The standing ovation after Prokofiev’s cantata was not acquiescence to the glorification of Stalin but just the opposite: It was a response to the stirring of the spirit in times of oppression.

Neither work represents evil sentiments (unlike, say, the bigoted bits of Wagner or the Nazi paeans of Richard Strauss). Shostakovich’s symphony gives vivid, if often patently obvious, display to the Czar’s coldblooded shooting of unarmed demonstrators at the Winter Palace. The history may be more moving than the music is, but the music describes the history well. And thanks to Shostakovich’s capturing of the mood and the spirit of the times, one better senses the need the Russian people felt for revolution.

Prokofiev’s cantata is slightly harder to stomach, not so much for the texts, which express righteous sentiments, but for the pageantry of the music, which suggests something about how power corrupts those sentiments. Still, Prokofiev’s cantata was completed in 1937, before Stalin’s worst offenses, and the Soviet Union, faced with war, needed unifying music. (Shostakovich’s symphony, written 20 years later, is actually the more cynical work, given how much more tyrannical the Soviet system had become.)

There may be kitsch in both the Shostakovich and Prokofiev works, but it is often inspired kitsch, especially when Prokofiev gets into his rousing mode with double chorus and huge orchestra blaring, along with a furious accordion band. And who could resist the intensity that Gergiev brought to this music, the grand range of expression that he gets from his remarkable orchestra? Certainly not this American audience.

Which leads to a final irony. How honorable this music sounds, coming on the heels of the Olympics’ opening ceremonies and the Three Tenors’ American concert, where the kitsch is of much lower quality and the cynicism more blatant. Prokofiev and Shostakovich were terrified artists responding to a dangerous situation, but were also trying to give the people something they could use in their lives. But with profit involved, the big-business producers of the Olympic ceremonies and the Three Tenors left even less leeway for art to peek through than the Soviets had in these instances.