Emigre Pianist Is on the Run--and Enjoying It

NEW YORK — You have to catch Vladimir Feltsman on the run. Last Thursday night, there was a benefit concert for the 92nd St. Y, where the Russian emigre pianist performed Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto for an audience that included some of New York’s highest society and that paid up to $1,000 a seat. The next day, it was off to New Paltz, where Feltsman teaches at the State University of New York, for two days of extensive, six-hour master classes.

Back in Manhattan on Monday for three days, Feltsman had another gala benefit, this one for Israel at Carnegie Hall, and then he flew to Toronto. From there, it’s straight to Southern California, where he will make his West Coast debut, performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Monday night in a pension fund concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Later come Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. After that, there will be engagements with the London Symphony and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and concerts in Milan, Paris and Tokyo.

Not bad for a pianist who a year ago was playing concerts in factories and farms in the Soviet Union, a refusenik who for eight years had been nervously waiting for an exit visa.

“It seems like now I’m getting more or less everything,” Feltsman says, alluding to this year’s exhausting schedule. “It’s two extremes. But I like this extreme much better.”

He’s squinting a bit. A photographer had been popping flash bulbs in his eyes for half an hour. And there had been another long photo session earlier in the day.

Feltsman is clearly a man in demand, and he appeared slightly weary--if in good spirits--the other day at his Manhattan apartment. The place, which he moved into eight months ago after he, his wife Anya and young son Daniel made their highly publicized departure from the Soviet Union, is still underfurnished. There is nothing on the walls, and crates of stereo component cartons are stacked in the dining room. A small television sits on a chair. A couple of well-thumbed decorating magazines, strewn about, imply this is not the way it’s going to stay.

Feltsman, in case you didn’t read newspapers or magazines or watch television last August, made the headlines when, in the spirit of glasnost , he finally received the exit visa he had applied for eight years earlier. The 35-year-old Jewish pianist had once been one of the brightest young Soviet musicians. But Feltsman was a pianist who had tasted success in Europe and whose musical interests simply couldn’t remain restricted; he needed more artistic freedom. Within two hours of his seeking permission to leave the Soviet Union, however, his records were yanked off the radio station play lists and his concerts canceled.

For two years, Feltsman wasn’t permitted to perform publicly. Then it was the awful circuit of farms, schools and factories, sometimes competing with machine noise, concerts Feltsman says were so ridiculous they were funny--but also very painful. It was only after an international protest that involved support from many noted musicians in the West, the help of the American ambassador in Moscow and some pressuring from the White House that Feltsman was at last permitted to emigrate.

As Feltsman stepped off the plane Aug. 18, he walked right into the American dream. The ubiquitous flash bulbs and bright television lights from the world’s media were waiting for him. (It hardly hurt that Feltsman and his attractive wife are particularly photogenic.)

Also waiting for him was the teaching post in New Paltz, with a comfortable salary of $80,000. Columbia Artists, the kingmaker among music managements, signed him. So did CBS Records, which had already released a tape of Chopin preludes that had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Last September, Feltsman played a command performance at the White House. In November, he made his Carnegie Hall debut, and within a few weeks, a recording of that event was rushed to the stores in time for Christmas shoppers.

How did Feltsman deal with all this pressure and with culture shock simultaneously? Like a cool, ambitious professional.

At the Carnegie recital, where he was scrutinized--”like an animal in a zoo,” as he puts it--by a celebrity crowd and an eagerly skeptical press, Feltsman unveiled his big, unflappable technique, the deep-ringing, soulful tone that we often associate with Russian artists, and a Romantic interpretive flair that proudly proclaimed individuality.

He wasn’t to everyone’s taste, and not every critic agreed that Feltsman is as important a musical phenomenon as a cultural one; still, hardly a review ended without welcoming an opportunity to hear the pianist again.

Asked how he has weathered this sudden deluge of attention, Feltsman says simply that he was prepared for it. As disheartening as the past eight years had been, Feltsman did not forget his dream. He spent the time productively learning new music--his repertory is huge and includes 30 concertos alone--and perfecting his English.

Of course, for any Soviet emigrethere is the process of acclimatization, but for Feltsman, who says that it is a joy to spend all his time with musical concerns rather than nightmarish bureaucratic ones, the actual adjustment to American life hasn’t been all that traumatic; and the problems he mentions--such as getting a lot of mail--are trivial ones.

“You see in Russia you maybe get one letter in a week. But here it’s daily. I’m getting numerous letters, documents, some nice letters, some stupid letters, a lot of junk mail. So that’s new. At the beginning, I was looking through it all. Now I just put most of them in the garbage basket.”

Banking is a new experience for him as well.

But the main impression is of a pianist who came to America full of Western savvy for career making. When sympathy was expressed for all the impositions that the press makes, he waved the notion away: “I know it’s important.”

Feltsman also has a surprising familiarity with--and involvement in--American culture. He may cultivate the image of a Russian pianist in the grand Romantic tradition, the kind of pianist who concentrates on giving robust, commanding performances of the great Romantic masterpieces. But Feltsman confesses to a real interest in American music. He calls Ives a great composer and says he wants to play his sonatas. He’s following the Minimalists with relish and wants to play them too.

He even brings up John Cage. “I don’t think that he’s just a kind of fun, avant-garde composer, shaking up the public. I think that he is a very serious figure and a real musician. I respect him.”

Although he dismisses the notion, Feltsman increasingly sounds as if he may have always had a subversive streak that couldn’t have pleased the Soviet authorities. In Paris, for instance, he discovered Olivier Messiaen’s music, and he was one of the first pianists to bring that music, with all its forbidden mystical Catholic imagery, to the Soviet Union. And he had to fight to program it.

Feltsman also associated with the more avant-garde composers in Moscow. He is especially close to Alfred Schnittke, who stayed at Feltsman’s apartment when he visited New York last month. Schnittke brought Feltsman a new sonata, which the pianist will premiere in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Feltsman’s interest in music ranges widely. Once, at a recital of French music in Moscow, he performed pieces by Couperin and Rameau on the harpsichord, although he now says that if he plays the harpsichord in public again he will “study it very thoroughly.”

His extensive recording plans include performances of Bach concertos conducted from the keyboard. He is recording Prokofiev concertos with Michael Tilson Thomas and Rachmaninoff with Zubin Mehta. He also has a compact disc of Liszt solo music in the works.

“I cannot say that I am a specialist in a certain circle of music. I’m a specialist for good music in general. So I like to play all music from Bach to Cage, and I see no reason to cut myself off from things.”

For the first time in his life, Feltsman has the freedom to play anything he wants. But for a pianist who is already booked solidly for the next two years, there is only one problem: “Now, I just need some time to look around.”