Making Music Together is the theme of a festival which will bring 285 Soviet com­posers, musicians, singers, dancers and poets to Boston this March in a cultural invasion of unprecedented scale, and which will send a similar number of Americans to the Soviet Union next year.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a drastic reduction in US appearances by Soviet artists, but glasnost is now open­ing the door once more and Boston's Sarah Caldwell has seen to it that The Hub will be the first American city to en­joy the benefits.

Caldwell, not known for doing things on a small scale, has arranged for three weeks of intense activity: Not only will there be three main public events each day, but numerous informal activities as well.

Sarah Caldwell will herself be center stage, conducting a new production of Dead Souls, an opera based on the comic novel by Gogol composed by Rodion Schedrin. Singers from the Bolshoi and Kirov Operas will join the Opera Com­pany of Boston. Caldwell will also conduct the US premiere of Schnittke's Requiem Mass, with soloists from both the Soviet Union and United States.

Dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet will have a full schedule. Star ballerina Maya Plisetskaya will perform in a balletic ren­dering of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, also set to music by Schedrin. Lady With a Small Dog, The Seagull, and Les Sylphides are among the many other ballets on offer.

Beyond the glamor of the mainstage events, perhaps the performances of great­est interest to the musically curious will consist of works by a dozen Soviet com­posers hardly known in the West, given in no less than twelve separate concerts. Western images of Soviet music still center around Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky; lit­tle is known about the vigorous contempo­rary musical culture in the USSR. The composers will be present in Boston, and will participate in discussions connected with each of their concerts, with inter­preters provided where necessary.

The Pokrosky Folk Music Ensemble and the unusual Moscow Ensemble of Plastic Drama, a mime company, will also be in town. The list goes on.

Perhaps less in the public eye, but equal­ly important, beginning a month before the festival, 16 students and six faculty from the Moscow State Conservatory will arrive to live and work with American fac­ulty and students at New England Conser­vatory in what conservatory President Laurence Lesser has described as a "musi­cal Skyiab". The visitors will give public concerts, too.

There is already a great deal of media hype at play over the visit, and perhaps de­servedly so: This is a big event. But it would be mistaken to allow the celebra­tions to proceed without at least attempt­ing to probe the darker questions. These include asking whether artistic freedom in the Soviet Union really has improved un­der glasnost, or whether art remains a heavily political institution in Soviet life, its creaters constrained to offer works the regime deems inoffensive. Could a Russian director stage "Gag Master Gorbachev" within 7,000 miles of downtown Moscow?

The Christian Science Monitor, reviewing a concert by the Soviet rock group "Avtograf" last Friday pointed out that "What rock fans in Washington, New York, Boston, Calgary (Canada), Califor­nia, and Utah are getting to see is officially approved rock, the kind of Soviet rock that gets to travel to the US and be pressed in vinyl by Melodiya, the state recording company." They are not "like some of the angrier cris-de-coeur declaring youth soli­darity or denouncing the Afghan war that have made other Soviet rock groups rally­ing points for alienated youth." Despite glasnost, the Monitor reports, the "Soviet Communist Party Central Committee is reportedly preparing 'instructions' on rock music, with Yegor Ligachev, the Kremlin's second-ranking official, leading the charge to curb the permissiveness that has pre­vailed under glasnost… Bands can now perform in large arenas or outdoors, get publicity through newspaper articles, and, in select cases, put out records. But in ex­change, they must clear their lyrics in ad­vance with an official board."

How do we know that the same is not true with classical music? Will we be lis­tening to a cross-section of Soviet music, or to a carefully censored preselection? How were the visitors to the United States chosen? And how many dissident artists are there rotting in Siberia for each artist brought to Boston? Our ears must not lis­ten to the music while being closed to these questions.

Nicholas Paleologos, Massachusetts House Chairman of Education, Arts and Humanities, interviewed at a press confer­ence at the State House given to launch the festival last Thursday, commented that there had recently been "fundamental changes" in the Soviet Union. "The regime has lessened its stranglehood on what is appropriate," he said. He was enthusiastic about the choice of music coming to the United States, because music has a capac­ity for "bridging the gap between ideolo­gies."

Paleologos' assertion will soon be test­ed. AH should take in as many of the events as possible, but do so criticaiiy, from both a musical and political viewpoint         

Jonathan Richmond
The Tech, February 2, 1988