Can The Bolshoi Adapt to the Times?

By Otto Friedrich

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 performances 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."

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow