Orchestras: Pursuing the U.S. Ideal

When the Boston Symphony made its triumphant debut in Moscow in 1956, Russian audiences were shocked to discover what the outside world had long acknowledged—that U.S. orchestras were the world’s finest. Russian cultural circles began buzzing with talk of the “orchestra gap.” One of the most outspoken critics was Kiril Kondrashin, then conductor with the Bolshoi opera, who bluntly declared that Russian orchestras had to shape up. Four years later, when Kondrashin was appointed conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic, he admitted that “the U.S. orchestra is the ideal I am working toward ”

U.S. audiences last week had an opportunity to hear how successful Kondrashin has been, as the 112-member Moscow Philharmonic launched its first tour of the U.S. with a series of concerts in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall. Consensus: an uneven but promising orchestra of international rank. The Moscow brass and woodwinds were bright and full-throated, but the strings sounded thin and oddly colorless. Though sometimes lacking in subtlety and balance, the orchestra played with great exuberance and a kind of healthy sentimentality. The tall, imposing Kondrashin, who does not use a baton, in the belief that the face can convey more than the arms, smiled and scowled like a silent-movie hero, occasionally punctuated climaxes with gestures as sudden and menacing as a karate chop. Compared with Russia’s other two major orchestras, both of which have previously toured the U.S., the Moscow Philharmonic proved itself superior to the heavily romantic Moscow State Orchestra but lacking the versatility and polish of the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Founded in 1951, the Moscow Philharmonic is Russia’s youngest major orchestra. Under the tutelage of Kondrashin, now 51, the Philharmonic specializes in the early classics, contemporary Soviet composers and what the Russians call modern music: Hindemith, Poulenc, Mahler. As for Schoenberg and his successors, Kondrashin says flatly: “Nyet! This is not music. This is noise.” He drills his young (average age: 35) musicians four to six hours a day. He admires U.S. orchestras for their happy blend of “German discipline and a French kind of freedom.” But as a loyal Communist, he has decried their artistic and financial dependency on “the voluntary sacrifices of millionaires,” whose only concern is their own “satisfaction and public advertisement.” Otherwise, he says, Americans are “warmhearted, broadminded and businesslike—just like Russians.”