Music: Shock Waves in Moscow

“I tell you,” said New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine, “it’s fantastic. Between us—our company and Stravinsky—we may bring about a change here that will influence the entire future of ballet and music.” Few who sensed the shock waves of excitement in Russian intellectual circles last week doubted that Balanchine knew what he was talking about. The visits of U.S. instrumentalists such as Van Cliburn and Isaac Stern may have been more loudly acclaimed by the Russian man in the street. But it remained for Russia’s two great expatriates —one of whom had not set foot in his homeland for half a century, the other for better than 35 years—to trouble and challenge some of the basic intellectual assumptions of Russian art.

When Choreographer Balanchine stepped from his plane into the glare of Moscow klieg lights, he was tearfully greeted by his brother, Composer Andrei Balanchivadze (original spelling of the family name), whom he had not seen for 43 years. In an airport interview with Moscow radio, he was welcomed to “Moscow, home of the classic ballet.” Balanchine promptly corrected the interviewer: the home of the classic ballet had moved to America, he insisted; Moscow was the home of the romantic ballet. Balanchine was equally outspoken about the music written by his brother, regarded as the leading composer of Soviet Georgia. “He composes old music,” said he, “but not old enough to be Bach.”

Applause from Dissenters. For the ballet’s opening-night program at the Bolshoi Theater, all seats were sold out weeks in advance, with the first several solid rows reserved for top officials of the Ministry of Culture. The New York company started with two relatively uncomplicated pieces—Balanchine’s Serenade and Jerome Robbins’ Interplay. But it remained for the third number on the program— the Balanchine-Stravinsky Agon—to electrify the audience. More sophisticated and far more abstract than Russian ballet fans are accustomed to, it moved even dissenters to applaud at certain high points. The upper galleries, jammed with younger members of the audience, erupted in noise at the curtain. Ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, a Bolshoi mainstay, remarked that although she was against abstract dancing in general, “the New

York City Ballet dancers are so superbly trained that it’s a pleasure to watch, whereas often abstract dancers are simply concealing their lack of talent.”

Pravda, not certain how far it should go in endorsing bourgeois decadence, cautiously found the opening night a “big success.” But the response of the crowds on the second night, when Balanchine’s dancers repeated the program in the new Kremlin Palace of Congresses, indicated that it was considerably more than that. Young Russian dancers, ballet students and just plain fans crowded to the stage at evening’s end and clapped until the lights were turned off. One source of amazement to the Russians, accustomed to illustrious but superannuated dancers loath to abandon the footlights, was the extreme youth of the Balanchine company: the youngest boy is 15, and there are four girls under 17, accompanied by their mothers. “Balanchine likes them young,” explained an American to the curious. “They’re more pliable.”

Hopeless from the Start. On the whole, the audiences seemed to like the absence of decorations that overwhelm the dancers in Bolshoi productions such as Spartacus. Said Composer Aram Khachaturian : “If Balanchine had done the choreography for my Spartacus, it wouldn’t have been a flop.” Balanchine politely disagreed. Spartacus was hopeless from the start, he said, because it was based on a false conception. Like much of Russian ballet, it subordinated music and dancing to plot and decoration, whereas ballet should be music and dance — first, last and foremost.

The City Ballet arrived only a few days before Stravinsky departed, after a half-hour chat with Premier Khrushchev. Neither Balanchine nor his dancers could miss the tremendous impact that Stravinsky’s visit had already had on Russian musicians long shut off from the fresh currents of Western musical thought. Russian music would not be the same again. Neither, chances were, would Russian dance.