Four Who Brought Talent Reveling in Freedom, They Enrich the Land with Their Creative Gusto "My Son Is My Life" -- a Pianist

By Michael Walsh

The first day Bella Davidovich sat down to practice the piano in her new apartment in Queens, N.Y., a neighbor slipped a note under the door asking her not to play so loudly. Winner of the International Chopin Competition, faculty member at the Moscow Conservatory, Deserving Artist of the Soviet Union, Davidovich was unknown to her new neighbors. Her nonpolitical departure from the U.S.S.R. had occurred without benefit of an international incident and the subsequent career-boosting headlines. Adding injury to insult, Davidovich had been mugged just after her arrival in New York City; unfamiliar with such American customs, she had resisted so fiercely that she required surgery to repair damage to her knees.

Today Davidovich, 56, is recognized in her adopted country as a leading international pianist, acclaimed for her fluent, elegant interpretations of Schumann and Chopin. Unlike those Soviet emigres who left their homeland seeking greater personal freedom and artistic success, Davidovich came to the U.S. for only one reason: to be with her son, Violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky, 30, who left the Soviet Union in 1977 to study at the Juilliard School in New York. "My son is my life," explains the quintessential Jewish mother, a widow since 1958. "I couldn't live without seeing him."

When the Soviet concert agency Goskontsert, probably fearing her defection, canceled her scheduled tours of Italy and the Netherlands, Davidovich decided that she would have to join Dmitry. Together with her mother and sister, she painstakingly gathered the required emigration documents, including such arcana as the funeral certificate of her grandfather; within six months all three were granted permission to leave.

She was able to take one rug, no furniture and no books or scores that predated 1946; family heirlooms had to be left behind. Forsaken too was the hard-won respect that the Soviets gave grudgingly to Jewish artists. "Jews are considered a lower echelon," notes Davidovich, a gentle, gracious woman whose expressive face and eyes faithfully mirror her emotions. "I received my title of Deserving Artist five years after friends who had won no competitions. In my career, everything, like playing in the West and teaching, happened with delays."

In exchange she got New York City's mean streets ("a terrible sight, all that garbage"), its Augean subway ("so loud and dirty"). Davidovich quickly fled to the apartment in Kew Gardens ("quiet, with trees and a fresh smell"). Perhaps the hardest thing to bear was her professional anonymity, the necessity of starting a career over again. "It was very difficult," remembers Davidovich, whose still limited command of English requires her to use an interpreter. "I was very famous in the Soviet Union. I had my public. I did not know if it would be good for me in the United States."

She has traveled widely in the U.S. on her concert tours. "I had read a great deal about America, but I had never realized how beautiful it was," she says of her new land. While she feels that the training Soviet musicians receive is superior, Davidovich believes American orchestras are better than their Russian counterparts, and she praises the emphasis on chamber music in the U.S. Like other emigres from totalitarian countries, however, she sees a darker side to the many liberties Americans enjoy. "For me, freedom has meant I am free to work and go where I please, when I want. But America knows another side of freedom that can lead to many bad things. The problems with crime are horrible here."

She has no longing to return to the Soviet Union. "If I could go back to play, I would do it," she says. "But in no other way would I go back. I have a new life here, and I like it." Davidovich has begun to concertize with her son, and together they have made two records of Grieg and Ravel. "I haven't the time to miss things in Russia," sums up Davidovich. "I am my own Goskontsert. I play with good conductors in good concert halls, and in every country there are friends from Russia. It's a good life."