Rising Russian

This week will be the 30th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Russia's composers, who point for anniversaries like greeting-card manufacturers, were ready to supply loud and brave noises. Serge Prokofiev, Russia's best, had prepared a special Holiday Overture. Dmitri Kabalevsky worked on a new opera, The Indomitable, for Moscow's famed Stanislavsky Theater. All in all, the Union of Soviet Composers proudly reported, 1,000 compositions had been specially written for the anniversary.

None was awaited with more interest than the new overture by brilliant young Aram Khachaturian, 43, which will have its premiere in Leningrad during the celebrations. He had scored it for 110 pieces, including a pipe organ and 18 trumpets. Said he: "It has no literary program--it is pure music." Then he hastily added: "But it has ideas . . . the legitimate feeling of pride and rejoicing for our nation's victory over the German invaders and the social significance of the 30th anniversary of the revolution. . . ."

Commissar's Delight. Composer Khachaturian's music is the kind that goes over well with commissars--because it also goes over well with the crowds. It has, like Tchaikovsky's music, melody, bounce and color--and basically banal themes. Khachaturian's life in a bureaucracy is therefore not as complicated as that of his musical betters, Prokofiev, the sophisticated ex-exile, or jittery Dmitri Shostakovich, whose musical talents are wrenched by ideology. In the most recent sampling of Russian musical tastes, Khachaturian works proved to be the second most frequently performed in the U.S.S.R. (first, Prokofiev; third, Tchaikovsky).

Born of Armenian parents in Stalin's native Georgia, young Aram appeared at a Moscow music school when he was 19, with little more to offer than a conviction that he was a musician. In three years he learned to scrub passably on the cello, studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Miaskovsky, who had been a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. When Aram graduated in 1933, his name was carved on a marble panel, an honor reserved for star pupils. Khachaturian still draws heavily on his native Armenian and Georgian folk themes and rhythms for his symphonies and concertos, and on Ravel and Stravinsky, among others, for his handling of them. The three living composers he admires most are Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. (Russian expatriate Stravinsky, now a U.S. citizen, has been denounced by Culture and Life as "a man without a fatherland.")

Poem on Stalin. Khachaturian has served his state well, and has been well served by it. Among his compositions is a Poem on Stalin. His pretty wife, Nina V. Makarova, who was a student of Miaskovsky's too, has written A Cantata for Molotov. She is working on an opera, ordered by the Bolshoi Theater, based on a story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a girl-Partisan heroine who was executed by the Nazis. Aram has won the Order of Lenin and two Stalin prizes (the last for his swirling, furiously rhythmic ballet, Gayane, a U.S. best-seller). He made a big hit with the Russian public during the war by returning one of his 50,000-ruble Stalin prizes ($10,000) and asking that a tank be built with the money.

Khachaturian's current ambition is to write an opera. Says he: "I believe that opera is the most democratic musical form, the one closest to the people. I think all Soviet composers feel that also."

Khachaturian lives six months at Ivanovo, a beautiful Composers Union-owned farm which he calls "an institution for the production of pigs and masterpieces," winters in an apartment in the House of Soviet Composers in Moscow. There he is busy at the Union of Soviet Composers--he is a first vice president--talking to musician friends and hearing and passing on new music. Says he: "When I hear too much, my ears get plugged and I can't hear any music of my own. Then I go back to Ivanovo where I can sit at my piano all day long and think of nothing but music."

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