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Week of 30 October 1998 Vol. II, No. 12 Arts Uspensky was a student of Shostakovich Russian crossover composer crossing over to BU for concerts and lectures When Ludmilla Leibman was still living in her native Russia, she could turn on a radio at just about any time and hear the music of composer Vladislav Uspensky. "I'm not talking about his chamber music or symphonies, though," she says. "I mean his popular songs." Leibman, a School for the Arts doctoral candidate, turns to her piano and plays from memory a few measures of a richly melodic, easy-to-take romance. "This kind of thing," she says. "It's called 'Snows of Russia,' and it has very sentimental and nostalgic lyrics. It is one of his most famous songs." Much of Leibman's time since March has been consumed with the logistics of a trip that brings Uspensky and his wife, musician and television personality Irina Taimanova, to BU this week as part of a U.S. tour that includes visits to Dartmouth, MIT, the Longy School of Music, and Ohio State. An archival photograph of Dmitri Shostakovich (center) and Vladislav Uspensky (right) with colleagues at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, probably from the late 1950s. Uspensky has published more than 100 songs in the past 40 years, and Russians know them, his musicals, and his film scores well. "But what makes him interesting," says Leibman, "is that he is first a classical composer. He was one of Shostakovich's very few students, he was the dean of theory and composition at the former Leningrad State Conservatory when he was very young, and he has been the vice president of the powerful Saint Petersburg Composers Union since 1972." He was also politically correct, in the original sense of the term. "Yes," says Leibman. "He was a Komsomol leader of the student composers and quite a beloved one. That says a lot about him, because he had authority and could have been very rigid or even a stukatch, a frightening Russian word that means a 'knocker' or 'betrayer.' Uspensky did not betray anyone. He was a communist party member, and he remains a prominent administrator and bureaucrat. He is rare in having been an official conformist while remaining a good and popular musician." And a good man? "We have been good friends for a long time so I can vouch for that. I know, too, that when Shostakovich was out of favor and was being denounced left and right, Uspensky never added his voice." Leibman met Uspensky nearly three decades ago when she began her studies at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where she later joined the faculty. (She now teaches music theory to nonmusic majors at SFA.) She spoke to him in March when she was in Saint Petersburg serving as interpreter for Marjorie Merryman, chairman of SFA's department of theory and composition, and a group of local composers and musicians. "I asked Uspensky if he would be interested in coming to BU," Leibman says, "and he certainly was." A commemorative program from Saint Petersburg in honor of Uspensky's 60th birthday last year. The composer was named the People's Artist of Russia in 1988. There is a possibility of BU's going back to Saint Petersburg with some kind of exchange program, according to SFA Dean Bruce MacCombie. "It's all exploratory at this point," he says, "but we're looking seriously at every option, from a faculty exchange to master classes to students coming here to an actual BU program there. We've had such success with the theater arts program in London and the visual arts program in Venice that we're looking for the final component of an SFA opportunity abroad. We're also investigating possibilities in Dresden and Munich." Uspensky's visit to the United States has prompted considerable curiosity in the local musical community because for all his success at home, he is unknown here. His week at BU began with a Composer's Forum on Tuesday and includes a lecture, entitled Shostakovich in My Life, to SFA Associate Professor Charles Fussell's class on Thursday, October 29. On Sunday, November 1, at 3 p.m. Julian Wachner, University organist, will conduct an All Saints Day Concert at Marsh Chapel that features Uspensky's While the Soul Leaves the Body and Sonata-Fantasy for Organ. Uspensky shares insights on teacher Shostakovich There could be a feeling of déjà vu at one of the sessions of this week's American Musicological Society conference, being held here in Boston. The session, which looks identical to a hot discussion at last year's AMS gathering, will examine composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his purported as-told-to memoirs, a book called Testimony. The book came as a shock because Shostakovich, long regarded as a loyal communist and patriotic Soviet citizen, allegedly maintains that in his own way he was secretly resisting the Soviet regime through his music. Since it was published, a few years after Shostakovich's death in 1975, Testimony has been denounced as a fraud and hailed as a revelation. Serious musicologists have fought for a generation about the book -- is it really Shostakovich or not? And are his symphonies really, as author Norman Lebrecht calls them, "a secret history of Soviet Russia"? One of the few surviving sources who could give us some insight into the real Shostakovich is Uspensky, who studied with him in Saint Petersburg from 1962 through 1965. Uspensky lectures this week on Shostakovich in My Life to a class of Charles Fussell, associate professor of music. Might this lecture provide the light to contrast with nearly 20 years of heat?