MOSCOW - It is a subzero day in February, but Denis Matsuev is making the other pianists in the room feel uncomfortably warm. Listening to the 23-year-old play Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz" is like listening to God create the universe: a fury of deafening thunderbolts mixed with unearthly beauty and tenderness.
"A talent like his turns up about once every 20 years, and when they do it's usually here," says the Milan Conservatory's Vincenzo Barzani, who has just taught the master class in which Matsuev performed.
"Here" is the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, which Barzani calls "the greatest and most endangered conservatory in the world."
To understand what concerns him, you must climb two flights of stairs - the conservatory's 19th-century lift is out of order today - to the rooms where students actually practice.
It is nearly as cold up here as it is outside. Piano students wear several layers of clothing and gloves with the fingers cut out. The conservatory cannot afford to heat these rooms, and it can't afford to keep the pianos in tune, let alone replace missing ivories or broken strings.
A visit to the conservatory's library is equally distressing. That Rachmaninoff score, with the composer's dedication in his own hand? It's falling apart, because the library doesn't have climate-controlled storage areas.
That recording of the famous recital Emil Gilels gave here 50 years ago? It's almost unlistenable now, because it wasn't transferred to tape before it began to deteriorate.
All of this worries Matsuev, whose good looks and curly hair recall those of the young Van Cliburn. What worries him most, however, is that Serge Dorensky, his primary teacher, earns only $130 a month.
"I continually live with the fear that our best teachers will leave the country," says Matsuev, who switched to Dorensky after his first teacher, Alexei Nasedkin, decided to work mostly in Japan, with its astronomically higher salaries. "In the five years I've been a student, five of the best [piano] teachers have left."
While Matsuev worries about his teachers, his teachers worry about him.
After hearing his "Mephisto Waltz," Barzani tells Matsuev: "It is time for you to go abroad to let people hear you, so that you can be as famous and as rich as you deserve to be."
Five months later, when Matsuev wins first prize in the quadrennial International Tchai-kovsky Competition, that time seems at hand.
In many respects, the young pianist's triumph is business as usual. The Tchaikovsky, the world's most famous competition, is almost always dominated by the Russians.
But this year, the standing-room-only crowd at the Bolshoi Zal - the conservatory's great concert hall - must contend with something new: the smell of human excrement.
Like everything else in Russia, the hall is breaking down. Its antiquated plumbing simply can't handle the thousands who have come to hear the world's finest young pianists, violinists, cellists and vocalists.
The Tchaikovsky Conservatory has produced as many great instrumentalists as the rest of the world's conservatories combined. But its future is threatened for the same reasons it cannot afford to fix its toilets.
The end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union may have been good for world peace. But they have been bad for music.
Musical powerhouse
The golden age of Soviet music was shaped by the iron hammer wielded by Josef Stalin.
In 1931, a group of musical prodigies gave a concert for Stalin and the other party bosses. Afterward, the dictator met with the children and their teachers and asked how they were living.
"Boris Goldstein, a 10-year-old violinist with a big talent and an even bigger mouth, got up and said conditions were 'terrible,' " says Lev Ginzburg, a Russian music historian.
"There was terrified silence after Busya [Goldstein] spoke," Ginzburg says. "Everyone in the room thought the NKVD would be knocking on their doors that night and that they would be waking up in the morning in Lubyanka prison.
"Finally, Stalin said, 'Well, then something must be done.' "
One result of that meeting was the establishment of free professional schools that were to prepare gifted children to enter the Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) conservatories directly. These so-called "central schools" were soon followed by the creation of similar preparatory institutions for the other conservatories in the former Soviet Union - eight in Russia, four in Ukraine and 10 in other Soviet republics.
Like Hitler, Stalin understood the propaganda value of culture. He realized that the achievements of musicians (like those of chess players, dancers and athletes) could demonstrate the superiority of communism over capitalism.
"Unlike our leaders today, Stalin went to the theater every night," says Sergei Usanov, the current director of Moscow's Central School. "He established big salaries for conservatory professors, who were getting 5,000 rubles a month when doctors were making only 1,000. He was a monster, but his influence is one of the reasons that this country grows talented musicians like mushrooms in the rain."
The system that Stalin helped to create made the Soviet Union the world's classical music powerhouse, with Moscow as its center.
Moscow began to attract the most ambitious and well-known performers, composers and teachers from other cities. Violinist David Oistrakh and pianists Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter arrived from Odessa in the 1930s; they were followed a decade later by the composer Dmitri Shosta-kovich, the pianists Vladimir Sof-ronitzky and Maria Yudina and the cellist Daniel Shafran from Leningrad.
Each year, teachers from the Moscow schools would scour the provinces for gifted children. Many of the most promising would be relocated to Moscow, with their families, so that they could study at the Central School. Such was the case, for example, of the 9-year-old Vladimir Ashkenazy (from Gorky) and the 11-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich (from Baku).
Art achievements
The country's excellence in teaching music has it roots in the 1860s, when the Rubinstein brothers, Anton and Nikolai, founded the St. Petersburg and Moscow conservatories. Russian achievements in music were paralleled by similar flowerings in the other arts. Russia's late entry into the Industrial Age and its belated development of a middle class made it hungry to catch up to the rest of Europe.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Russia had produced musicians such as the pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff and Josef Lhevinne, the violinists Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz and the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. The Revolution of 1917 led to the departure of some of the country's great figures, but most remained. And the pedagogy that had produced a Rachmaninoff and a Heifetz was to be elaborated, systematized and, in the 1930s, collectivized.
The results were apparent in the decades after World War II, when young Russian musicians, particularly pianists, surpassed their Western contemporaries in competition after competition.
"When you get really young people molded by a really strong force, you achieve interesting results," says pianist Ivan Davis, who teaches at the University of Miami. "I usually don't see
people until they are graduate students. At that age you can refine them, but you can't awaken them to music. The Soviets had the ability to teach young kids, and they didn't wait until they were 18 to match them with good teachers."
The Russian success may also have been a measure of attitude: Americans may admire classical music, but Russians revere it.
The Soviet citizens of the post-World War II years probably would have been just as absorbed by the TV sets, popular movies, washing machines and flashy, relatively inexpensive automobiles that thrilled Americans.
"But," pianist Vladimir Feltsman says, "our government devoted our economy to different sorts of things: To heavy industry, which produced items such as tractors; to scientific research, which few people understood; and to culture, including sports and the arts, which we cared about all the more because we didn't care about the others."
Musicians also enjoyed an enviable position in Soviet society. Even teachers at the approximately 5,000 Children's Music Schools (not to be confused with the much more prestigious central schools) earned salaries equal to those of doctors or engineers.
"Money was the least of it," adds Feltsman, who studied in Moscow in the 1960s and '70s and who emigrated to the United States in 1987. "Everyone was poor - the important thing about being a musician was that it meant you had respect and prestige. And being any kind of an artist also meant you had access to something incredibly precious in a society as repressive as ours: You had a key to a better world in works of imagination."
Things were different for the musicians who came later, especially after the beginning of glasnost in the late '80s. The switch to a free-market economy made cities like Moscow as expensive as New York. The once generous salaries of conservatory professors dwindled to about a tenth of their former earning power. Life became more difficult still for teachers of children.
"Once, people could make a good living [in Russia] by teaching music to children, and once parents encouraged their talented children to become musicians, because it meant that they would lead good lives," says Richard Rodzinski, executive director of the Van Cliburn International
Piano Competition. "If those times are past, as they seem to be, then the future of Russian music is in serious trouble."
Funds dry up
Last February, a sign posted at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory's entrance bore a familiar message: "No checks will be received today - tomorrow perhaps."
By Friday, the sign was covered by graffiti, one of which declared: "If we wait until Judgment Day, then and only then can Russians expect justice and (perhaps) a check."
While the faculty and staff began to receive checks three weeks later, the librarians - whose salary was $20 a month - struck for more than two months for a wage increase. After receiving a $2 raise in April, the librarians returned to work. At summer's end, the students still haven't received their $16 monthly stipends.
"Salaries here are terrible," says Daniel Pollack, an American pianist who was a juror during last summer's Tchaikovsky Competition. "But," he adds, "the pianos are just as bad."
The pianos of the Tchaikovsky and Peabody conservatories provide an interesting comparison. Including faculty and students, Moscow's conservatory has about 400 pianists, Baltimore's about 150. In the last 12 years, Peabody acquired about 50 new instruments and completely rebuilt 87 of its old ones. In the 16 years between 1982 and 1998, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory acquired no new pianos and did not rebuild any.
For Moscow's music students - and not just its pianists - this is more than a nuisance. It is a hazard, particularly during the long winter.
"An out-of-tune piano makes it all-but-impossible for a singer to stay in tune," says conservatory choral-conducting student Mariana Ryzhak. "But any singer who cannot properly locate the key and must also sing in temperatures so cold that he cannot properly warm up his vocal cords is in danger of permanently damaging his voice."
Conservatory students often have to scramble to make ends meet. The 24-year-old Ryzhak, for example, lives in a small, four-room apartment, which she shares with two families. Because she speaks fluent English, she can earn enough to eat by scheduling baby-sitting jobs for Western families around appointments as a translator. That means long working days and short nights that often do not leave her enough time for her studies.
While the conservatory is free for Russians, citizens of the new republics formed from the former Soviet Union, such as Ukraine or Georgia, must pay. This upsets those who care about the musical traditions that once embraced the entire Soviet empire.
"It is a serious problem that talented people in the cities of what used to be the U.S.S.R. can't study at the conservatory if they cannot afford it," Matsuev says. "Imagine how much poorer Russian music would have been if poor boys from Odessa and Baku had not been allowed to come to Moscow so that they could become Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich. Those were the days that my teachers reminisce about."
Show them the money
Not every musician in Moscow today is poor, however.
When you enter Vera Gornostaeva's apartment, you remove your shoes. The Oriental rugs that cover nearly every square inch of the floors are to be trod only in slippers or in stocking feet.
Now in her middle 60s, Gornostaeva was never considered a major pianist. But her apartment is several times larger than those of more distinguished colleagues. The living room where she entertains guests does not seem diminished in size by two 9-foot concert grands. She is dressed fashionably, her hair is perfectly coiffed; she wears an emerald on her right hand, a diamond on her left and pearls around her neck.
Gornostaeva acquired her high standard of living - as well as her practice of making guests remove their shoes - through her frequent trips to Japan.
Other than "it's a lot," Gornostaeva will not say what she earns in Japan. But well-known Russian teachers are treated well by the Japanese, who pay their first-class airfare and living expenses, in addition to fees of about $2,000 to $3,000 for master classes, a dozen of which can easily be fitted into a three-week visit. Such visits also leave room for several private lessons at about $300 an hour.
She shows her American visitor an expensively produced, full-color brochure, whose cover, in bold letters, reads: "Gornostaeva: Pianist, Teacher, Publicist." The brochure demonstrates an understanding of Western marketing techniques that some of her colleagues are either too old or unwilling to learn.
Gornostaeva says there are now enough "new Russians," as the country's newly rich capitalists are popularly called, so that she can teach privately in Russia and make nearly as much money as she does by going to Japan. The rich Russians she teaches "may not be the best [musically]," she admits, but she adds that the fees they pay subsidize "the poor students with talent" she teaches at the conservatory.
She rings a bell and a uniformed servant appears.
"Do you want some tea?" Gornostaeva asks.
All that remains
There are no servants in Oleg Boshnyakovich's apartment. In fact, as the octogenarian pianist explains apologetically, there isn't even any tea.
Still, he wants to offer his guests something. A visit to the refrigerator in his kitchen, with its buckling linoleum floor, turns 11 up nothing except for a few eggs, some moldy cheese, and a half-filled bottle of sweetened cherry juice.
This is probably the first you've heard of him. But several well-known pianists - Feltsman and Evgeny Kissin, among them -insist that Boshnyakovich ranks among the greatest pianists of the last 50 years.
In Japan, the recent reissue on CD of several of the pianist's old LPs has turned him into something of a celebrity. The CDs, which have received enthusiastic reviews from Japanese critics, have become among the best-selling items on the Japanese classical music charts.
He earns no royalties from the sales, but he is nonetheless thrilled.
"I have received many invitations to go there [Japan]," Boshnyakovich says, as he and his guests sip their drinks. "I would like to, but I'm too old to travel so far. Besides, the pain in my hands does not permit me to play much."
Nevertheless, the pianist - who suffers from a heart condition - must climb up and down six flights of stairs in his apartment building, which does not have an elevator. He has a voucher for treatment at a sanatarium 30 miles outside Moscow and has been on its waiting list for almost a year.
"It's overcrowded, so I'm not too hopeful about getting to see a doctor," he says.
His tiny, three-room apartment is as grim as his situation. The grand piano in his living room leaves scarcely enough space for visitors. Wooden framework shows behind the crumbling plaster walls, which are bare except for faded photos of his parents, his teachers and friends, such as the late Sviatoslav Richter.
The 107-year-old piano needs major repairs, something Boshnyakovich can not afford on his teaching salary of $118 a month. However, he's proud of his ancient instrument, a Bechstein he bought when he was a young man. Bechsteins, he says, were the favorite instruments of Brahms, Artur Schnabel, Dinu Lipatti and Richter.
"Richter loved this instrument," Boshnyakovich says. "Whenever we had parties here, we couldn't keep him away from it."
"Would you like to hear me play it?" the pianist suddenly asks.
He sits down to play the first of Chopin's G minor nocturnes.
The instrument is out of tune and Boshnyakovich's arthritis has left his technique a little unsteady.
But the phrases emerging from his fingers are as beautiful as ever. It is playing that evokes the values of a bygone era, reminding the listener why music - and not just in Russia - needs the Russian past.
To Russia, with love
A few days after the Tchaikov-sky Competition, Mikhail Ovchinnikov, the conservatory's rector, sits in his office, discussing the future of Russian music education.
"The future of our conservatories depends on the future of Russia itself," Ovchinnikov says. "Russia is in the most difficult times, but it wants to preserve its culture."
The rector seems nervous. He's expecting an important foreign delegation.
"Will you excuse me for just a few minutes?" Ovchinnikov asks his American guest, as his secretary ushers in a group of seven Japanese, all of whom wear tags identifying themselves as representatives of the Kawai Piano Co.
Ten minutes later, the door to the rector's office opens. Ovchinnikov, now wearing a big smile, walks out and bids farewell by shaking hands with and bowing to his guests, bowing most deeply to the oldest member of the group.
"Do you know who that was?" Ovchinnikov asks, as he brings the American back into the office. "That was Mr. Kawai himself."
No wonder the rector's glowing. Mr. Kawai has just given seven new concert grands - worth approximately $500,000 - to the conservatory.
While the Russian government is supposed to supply 33 percent of the conservatory's budget - in Soviet days it was 100 percent - in reality its contribution is much less than that and it is dropping as precipitously as the ruble.
Since the Revolution, Russia has had no tradition of private support for the arts. When Ovchinnikov talks about raising money, he generally refers to sources outside Russia, usually Japan or the United States.
The Japanese have a high regard for Russian culture generally, for its music specifically and most especially for its pianists. It's not surprising that Kawai should want Russians to be seen and heard performing his instruments. Another reason for Japan's interest in Russia's conservatory system is that many young Japanese musicians now study in Russia. In an attempt to raise money, Russian conservatories have opened their doors to foreigners, who pay $7,000 a year.
But Japanese corporations have been less generous to the cause of Russian music than they were earlier in the decade - when, for example, the Pioneer Corp. completely underwrote the 1990 and 1994 Tchaikovsky Competitions at a cost of nearly $10 million.
The chief reason for the drop in support has been the weakness of the Japanese economy. But another reason is Japanese worry about crime and incompetence in the management of Russian cultural institutions.
The most serious case of fiscal mismanagement involved the Central Music School. Twelve years ago, it was obliged to vacate its old building, a few blocks from the conservatory, and move to a distant neighborhood, an hour away by subway. The relocation was supposed to last only two years, but the renovation money disappeared. The old building itself was sold to a private developer - the Central Music School never saw a kopeck from the sale - who turned it into a number of profitable shops.
"Ten years after we were supposed to have returned," says Central School director Usanov, "we're still in a building located more than an hour away from the conservatory - a building in such terrible condition that its facilities make those of the conservatory look good by comparison."
According to Usanov, the Central School needs $9 million to $10 million for a new facility and new instruments.
"That's really not so much, and the work could be completed in five to six months," he says. "We have dozens of extremely talented children who would benefit by it."
Playing in the street
One of those talented children might have been the tow-headed boy, about 8 or 9, who played his violin in the Okhotny Ryad Metro station located beneath Tverskaya Street, across from the Kremlin.
In Soviet times, street musicians were never seen - not by tourists, at least. Playing for money in the street was begging. That was not only unseemly and supposedly unnecessary in communist society, but also not something that the privileged Russian musicians needed to do. Now Moscow, like other large cities, is filled with street musicians - particularly at subway stops.
The young violinist may have had the best location in the city. Tverskaya is the avenue where "new Russians" shop for the latest Western fashions and wealthy tourists stay at hotels for $300 a night or more. Moreover, Okhotny Ryad is the Metro stop closest to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Every day for almost a month last summer, thousands passed through it on their way to the Tchaikovsky Competition. It was then that the boy performed.
He was no ordinary street musician, but an authentic prodigy. He played Bach partitas, Paganini caprices and Kreisler morceaux with cold-eyed aplomb. And - like the somewhat older musicians a few blocks away at the competition - he drew a crowd. Appreciative Russians and foreigners stuffed his cap with ruble notes, deutsche marks and U.S. dollars.
He also was no innocent. Under the watchful eyes of what were perhaps adult accomplices or parents, he applied the same sleight of hand to his finances as he did to his fiddle. Although the boy could have used a gym bag to carry away his nightly earnings, he never permitted his cap to become more than half-filled.
He was entrepreneurial as well as musical, both the Artful Dodger and Oliver Twist. And, for better or worse, he may be the future of music in Russia.
Pub Date: 9/20/98