TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.8 KB | 181 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 64

Can the Bolshoi Adapt to the Times?


The Soviet opera troupe, now on a U.S. visit, is struggling to
survive glasnost

By OTTO FRIEDRICH -- Reported by Nancy Newman/New York and Yuri
Zarakhovich/Moscow


    When Moscow's Bolshoi Opera paid its first visit to the
U.S. in 1975, it amply lived up to its name, which is Russian
for big. The company offered majestic productions of such epics
as Prokofiev's War and Peace and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov,
plus that Russian national favorite, Tchaikovsky's Eugene
Onegin. That was the monolithic age of Brezhnev, after all, and
the Bolshoi had long been the Kremlin's chief cultural weapon;
the party bureaucracy decreed the choices of repertory,
casting, even stage sets. The results were as strong as a tank,
and just as subtle. Still, American audiences were impressed by
the quality of the spectacle, no less than by the company's rich
history and exoticism.

    The dramatic upheavals that have reshaped Soviet society
since then have also transformed cultural life. Glasnost and
perestroika have done wonders in some fields, but in the
pampered world of the nation's artistic institutions, change and
the onset of Western-style competition have caused severe
difficulties. The Bolshoi, among others, has seen its state
subsidies go way down; at the same time, expenses have gone up,
and the company's conservative and inefficient practices have
been placed in a harsh new light. Moreover, many of the
U.S.S.R.'s brightest young singers, now free to seek
opportunities wherever they like, have chosen to sing mainly in
the West. "Our problems here are very much the same ones this
country faces today," says Bolshoi general director Vladimir
Kokonin. "The country aspires to freedom and a decent way of
life. We here aspire to get rid of the vestiges of a serf
theater."

    Last week the Bolshoi began a return visit to the U.S.,
and its opening production showed the effects of its struggle
to adapt to changing times. At Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera
House, the company presented a brand-new version of its
trademark work, Eugene Onegin. Only in the ballroom scene of the
last act did the Bolshoi offer a whiff of its old grandiosity.
Otherwise, the staging -- apparently designed to focus more
attention on the main characters -- relied on one
all-too-all-purpose country-house set for the first four scenes
and on one skeletal tree for the fifth.

    The casting of Onegin was designed to show off the
Bolshoi's new crop of young singers. What is different about
them? "Everything," says company spokesperson Svetlana
Zavgorodnaya, with characteristically Russian fervor. "New
emotions, new aesthetics, a new understanding of life!" Be that
as it may, the young singers carry on the company's tradition
of close ensemble performance. Vladimir Redkin as Onegin was an
appropriately dashing cad. And in Nina Rautio, the Bolshoi
presented a Tatiana who could be touchingly lyrical and also
break a glass in the uppermost gallery. She carried her scenes
triumphantly.

    This week at the Met, and in the tour's finale next week
at the Wolf Trap festival outside Washington, the Bolshoi will
offer two far less familiar works, which are nevertheless as
characteristically Russian as the Onegin. One is
Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada, a spectacular combination of opera and
ballet, folk fantasy and fairy tale. Mlada is an oddity that
played only fitfully after its premiere in 1892 and had
disappeared for more than a half-century when the Bolshoi
revived it in 1988. "Mlada was a hard test for us," says chief
designer Valery Levental, "because nobody knew how to produce
an opera-ballet at a contemporary theater. The tradition was
long gone.'' Director Boris Pokrovsky had the imaginative idea
of using dolls to represent the main characters from time to
time, but conductor Aleksander Lazarev sees Mlada's importance
in musical terms: "Mlada's music is aimed at this 20th century
of ours. Its living lines extend to the pagan music of
Stravinsky and Prokofiev."

    The second rarity is Tchaikovsky's little-known version of
the Joan of Arc story, The Maid of Orleans, based on a play by
Schiller. It presented a different problem: how to bring life
to what is essentially a series of choruses and processions. One
solution was to highlight Joan's fictitious romance with a
Burgundian soldier. The Bolshoi's directors, says Kokonin, "read
Tchaikovsky's music according to what they saw as Schiller's
original theme: the conflict of love and duty."

    However these works are received by American audiences,
they will be shadowed by the twin demons that dog the Bolshoi
back home, budget crises and hostile critics. "There is a
fierce struggle going on at all levels of the Soviet government,
and this struggle is mirrored in every cultural institution,
and particularly in the Bolshoi, the jewel in the Soviet
crown," says Harlow Robinson, a professor of Slavic languages
and literature at the State University of New York at Albany,
a biographer of Prokofiev and a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi.
"Because they previously were supported entirely by subsidy,
they didn't have to worry about paying bills. These institutions
are new at this, finding their own money. They are desperate."

    "Desperate" is also a term used by Mark Hildrew, a London
music manager who has specialized in hiring away Soviet singers.
"The Bolshoi standards have gone down in the past seven or
eight years," says Hildrew. "Maybe I am one of the culprits for
trying to find the best Soviet talent and taking these people
away. That leaves gaps."

    The Bolshoi's main problem, says Marina Nestyeva, an
editor at the Moscow monthly Sovetskaya Muzyka, is that at a
time when smaller, more venturesome troupes are springing up in
the U.S.S.R., and even the rival Kirov Opera of Leningrad is
showing new vitality, "they lack the gusto. They do too little,
too slowly. Such immobility is simply impermissible these days."
Critics take the dilapidated condition of the Bolshoi Theater
(which also houses the equally straitened Bolshoi Ballet) as
symbolic. Spots have darkened its walls; danger signs hang here
and there; the sculpture of a chariot-borne Apollo on its roof
stands within a protective cage awaiting repairs. THE BOLSHOI
BUILDING ((IS)) ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE, warned a headline in
the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

    Much of the current controversy in Russian opera involves
repertory. The ossified Soviet opera machinery, reflecting the
narrow tastes of its erstwhile Soviet masters, plays only
traditional Russian works, rarely touches Mozart or Wagner or
anything from the 20th century. The outside world hardly needs
new versions of La Traviata, and an indifference to new music
also characterizes Western opera. Furthermore, the Bolshoi's
traditionalism has helped preserve some splendid but otherwise
neglected music. Still, Soviet opera musicians feel constrained
and constricted. "The country strives to reacquire its cultural
identity, to restore the natural chain of cultural history that
has been forcibly interrupted," says general director Kokonin.
``That is precisely what concerns us here at this theater."

    A year ago last week, all Soviet musicians, actors and
ballet dancers halted their perform ances for five minutes to
protest what Culture Minister Nikolai Gubenko called the
"tragic" state of Soviet culture. In the year since then,
nothing has greatly changed or improved.

    When it came time for the Bolshoi to fly West, the Kremlin
paid nothing, at least not directly. The company wheedled
Aeroflot into providing two airliners, and got the Defense
Ministry to transport some 750 tons of sets and scenery. The
Elbim Bank, a new institution for entrepreneurial investments,
put up a little cash to help out. "The Ministry of Culture asked
me to take a couple of their officials along," Kokonin recalls,
with an impresario's smile. "I felt so happy to tell them that
I wouldn't."

    The main financing for the Bolshoi tour was actually
supposed to come from Entertainment Corporation U.S.A., a
subsidiary of a British firm. But as the deadline neared, the
sponsors filed for bankruptcy and the whole tour seemed in
jeopardy. To the rescue, like some plumed boyar galloping across
the steppes, came Ara Oztemel, a Turkish-born Armenian American
who heads an East-West trading corporation named Satra (and
plays a hot saxophone on the side). And so the show could go on.
But the Bolshoi leaders are aware that they still face a
daunting challenge. "Our task is not to return to the world
stage, which we had never left," says Valery Zakharov, the
deputy general director, "but to reaffirm our place there."