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THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CHEKHOV FESTIVAL IS OVER
TIKHON KHRENNIKOV IS 85
THE FAMED RUSSIAN CURCUSMAN AND TAMER, VLADIMIR DUROV, WOULD HAVE TURNED 135 IF ONLY HE LIVED TO THIS DAY...

THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CHEKHOV FESTIVAL IS OVER

By Olga Rusanova

"From winter to summer", that's how the Third International Checkov Theater Festival in Moscow could be dubbed. The festival took the long two and a half months, starting on March 26, when snow still lay in the capital, and ending on June 9 during a heat wave with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. The Chekhov festival has been held every year since 1992. This year it marked the centenary of the Moscow Art Theater, due this fall. The theater itself and its founders Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko are held sacred by lovers of the theater the world over. Perhaps, this explains why most of the leading stage producers have come to Moscow. It largely depends on these people what kind of theater we have in the 21st century.

At the opening ceremony at the Moscow Art Theater on March 26 the leader of an American repertory theater in Boston R. Broustein said that his company's feelings for the Moscow Art Theater were very much like those of a child for his father. The entire American dramatic theater, he said, has been brought up on the ideas of Stanislavsky. Americans are proud that the great producer wrote in the 1920s his major work "My Life in Art" at the request of a Boston publishing house.

The festival has just closed. Moscow has seen some 50 productions from Europe, Asia, North and South America by such celebrities as the French A. Mnouchkine, the American R. Broustein, the Brit D. Donnelan, the Georgian R. Sturua, the Russians Lev Dodin and Boris Eifman, the Brazilian A. Araujo, the Japanese T. Suzuki, the Greek T. Terzopulos and the Estonian E. Nuganen.

The head of the mission of the European Commisssion in Russia, Ottocar Han, says that since its birth in 1992 the Chekhov Festival has been a major event on the world theater scene, attracting leading producers from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This year the festival marks the centenary of the Moscow Art Theater, which has given it even more significance.

Many producers brought their versions of famous Chekhov's plays. Many of the Chekhov plays we thought we knew well came as a surprise, and the original treatment made some even difficult to recognize. In his production of "Ivanov", a play about a Russian Hamlet searching for answers to eternal questions, the eccentric young director P. Lebl from the Czech Republic dressed his characters in bizzare costumes and put wigs on their heads. The public found this amusing. The Pole J. Jairozki staged Chekhov's early unfinished play about another restless Russian, Platonov, who makes a mess of his life, carrying on with several women at the same time. The play focuses on the hero's love affairs. The German Ch.Marthaler came up with a version of "The Three Sisters" that obviously shocked the Moscow audience. All his characters are middle-aged. Their movements are strange. In the background a Chopin prelude is played over and over on an untuned piano. The drama turns into something grotesque. The director added to it a touch of his own by making the characters move only down a long staircase, which, apparently, was meant to symbolize their slow but sure descent: from dreams into reality, from high ideals into low truths.

Germans appear to be particularly attracted to Chekhov's dramatic works. Muscovites remember Peter Stein's "The Cherry Orchard" and "Uncle Vanya". This year the outstanding producer brought no play to Moscow but paid tribute to the festival and Chekhov by delivering a lecture, "My Chekhov".

Another celebrated producer, the leader of the London-based theater "Cheek by Jowl" D. Donnelan came to the festival with Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing". Explaining, Donnelan said he would love to stage Chekhov, but so many of Chekhov's plays are staged in London; every year there are not Three but Thirty Three Sisters running. Donnelan is sure that Chekhov is the greatest Russian playwright, just as Shakespeare is the greatest English.

The French producers showed their own tastes in Russian literature. Their idol is not Chekhov but Dostoevsky. The young Olivier Pey, for example, believes that the focus must be on the passionate inner work always underway in the hearts of the Dostoevsky characters. Another French producer, the experienced Ariane Mnouchkine, whose father was Russian, is fond of quoting Dostoevsky, for one, his famous words that beauty will save the world. Mnouchkine's production, "Suddenly the Nights Became Sleepless" capped the festival. It's a present-day story on the East-West theme based on politics.

Judging by the festival's bills, at the end of the century the theater is given to generalizations and reflections. True, there were entertaining productions, but, these obviously do not determine the development of the world theater, notably of drama. Even the musical theater looks for a message today.

The outstanding ballet master from St. Petersburg Boris Eifman says: "I have sought to find new possibilities in the dance not only by creating new forms and techniques. I have tried to give movement a new psychological and emotional impulse. Today we have reached the goal by making movement embody the soul." Eifman's productions, "My Jerusalem. Requiem" and "Red Giselle", illustrate his words perfectly. There is every reason to call the ballet master "a philosopher of the dance".

The Chekhov Festival has shown that the theater is not simply alive and full of ideas and talented people. Today, at the turn of the century, it seeks to reach the philosophical depths of life and civilization. In this it has, probably, been more resolute and gone farther than even literature and philosophy, to say nothing of the cinema. Like a mirror, the theater reflects our moral losses, unavoidable in a society where money is the measure of everything, even humans. This is the message of a most exciting production by the St. Petersburg Maly Drama Theater of Lev Dodin, a version of Chekhov's early unfinished play left by the author without a title. Lev Dodin billed it simply "A Play Without a Title".

Lev Dodin says: "Artists not only preserve history and nations, but create the fragile safety net of civilization. I am sure that even the most mediocre theater is better than a perfect military battalion. Despite the prosperity of a few countries, the world at large is far from prosperous. We have only art to rely on. In all times rulers supported artists. Today we remember many of these rulers only because they were the contemporaries of these artists."

TIKHON KHRENNIKOV IS 85

By Larisa Roshchina

On June 10, 1998, the outstanding Russian composer Tikhon Khrennikov turned 85. For his long-time and fruitful contribution to Russian culture he has been honored by Russia's highest awards and titles. The latest award, the Order of Honor, came to the composer just days before his 85th anniversary.

"In the 85 years of my life there have been so many events, great and unimportant, exciting and dull that I can hardly recall all," says Tikhon Khrennikov. "It's very important to me that all my life I have worked and wrote music."

Khrennikov's is a surprisingly lyrical talent. His every work, and he has written a sea of music, including songs, romances, symphonies, operas, ballets and chamber music pieces, captivates the listener above all by its warmth and sincerity. His music can be equally understood by both professionals and unsophisticated lovers of music. For inspiration the composer has always drawn on Russian nature.

Yelets, an old town in Central Russia, where Tikhon Khrennikov was born and brought up, stands on the banks of a charming little river surrounded by apple-tree gardens. Like in many other provincial towns, nature and everyday life in Yelets are genuinely Russian. In the years of Tikhon's childhood the town lived a full and exciting cultural life. Numerous brass bands and string orchestras performed in public parks and gardens, families got together to play music and sing folk songs and urban songs and romances to the accompaniment of the guitar, mandolin or balalaika. Lovers of the theater staged amateur theatricals and were zealous readers: the city boasted a wonderful public library. All this provided a stimulating cultural environment for Tikhon, the tenth and youngest child in the family of salesman Nikolai Khrennikov. The parents saw to it that all the children had received an excellent education.

"I was still a kid when I knew I wanted to become a musician. At 6, before I started to take piano lessons, I read a biography of Mozart. The life of the great composer impressed me greatly. I remember climbing onto a hay-loft and vowed I would become a musician. I began composing music at 12 or 13 as soon as I knew how to put down the notes. Through my acquaintances in Yelets I sent my compositions to Moscow, to the famous composer and teacher Mikhail Gnesin, who invited me to study in the capital. Then followed the years of an all-out effort: I practiced on the piano for hours on end and did a lot of composing. At the Moscow Conservatory I was lucky to attend the class of the celebrated pianist Professor Heinrich Neigauz. I remember his lessons very well. Last year I played my Third Piano Concerto in St. Petersburg. I thought I would not be able to cope with it. But the years of study were not in vain. Besides, I have always appeared in concerts as a pianist. As for composition, I took lessons from Vissarion Shebalin. I have had so many wonderful teachers both in music and in life.

Khrennikov's career and work have always been followed by lovers of music. His operas "In a Storm" and "Mother" were staged at the leading Russian Theaters: the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg. His comic operas "Frol Skobeev", "The Golden Calf", "Dorothea" and others were a tremendous success. His ballets "Love for Love", "The Hussar's Ballad" have never been off stage. His symphonies were performed under the direction of the leading Russian and foreign conductors. His instrumental concerts are dedicated to Russia's best performers, Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonid Kogan.

Tikhon Khrennikov is an acknowledged master of pop music. Many melodies from his music written to more than 60 movies have long won the love of millions of Russians.

"I have always wanted to write music for movies, where songs are not simply musical insertions but provide a deeper insight into the inner life of the characters and help understand the situations," says Tikhon Khrennikov. "I have always been lucky with film directors. The first was the famous Ivan Puriev in the film "The Pig-Tender and the Shepherd". After that I could afford making my choice of films. Later I went crazy about the theater and wrote a lot of music for it. I worked with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Natalia Sats. Probably, my drive for a change in musical genres is not accidental."

And in recent years Tikhon Khrennikov has been particularly keen on ballet music. He wrote the ballet "Napoleon Bonaparte", which was premiered in 1995. Only a while ago he completed a ballet based on the novel "The Captain's Daughter" by Alexander Pushkin timed to mark the poet's 200th birth anniversary due next year. The Kremlin ballet company is now producing the ballet.

The composer's everyday-life habits and needs are very modest. "Satiety," he says, "does not help you work well. Artists must not become rich."

"My wife, the woman I have been together with for 61 years, has a similar attitude toward life. She is a person close to me in spirit and aspirations. We have the same world outlook and this is what makes us happy."

Tikhon Khrennikov has never neglected public activities. For 43 years he has headed the Soviet Union of Composers, for 40 has chaired the organizational committee responsible for the international Tchaikovsky competition, a prestigious contest, the composer believes, that is the most interesting musical event in the world. Summing up, one can say that setting goals and achieving them has been the life style of this wonderful Russian composer.

THE FAMED RUSSIAN CURCUSMAN AND TAMER, VLADIMIR DUROV, WOULD HAVE TURNED 135 IF ONLY HE LIVED TO THIS DAY...

Olga Rusanova reports:

120 years ago the cadets at Moscow's military gymnasium were having their exams on religion. Presiding solemnly over the large, green-draped table, were the schoolmaster, a priest, the teachers and the trustees. The walls of the large examination room were hung with the portraits of Tsar Alexander the Third and his wife. Then they called in Vladimir Durov. The door swung open and the examiners all gasped at the sight of someone's legs dangling in the air and, way down, just above the floor, the strain-flushed face of a young man. Vladimir Durov made his entrance walking on his hands! The teachers were flabbergasted and the priest nearly burst with anger. "Get out, you, clown!" yelled the enraged schoolmaster.

The schoolmaster's frustration was understandable, but calling Vladimir a clown, he hit the nail right on the head. Vladimir Durov did become a great clown and a tamer setting forth the world-famous Durov dinasty who also will celebrate their 135th birth anniversary this coming June 25th...

Vladimir Durov erected his own monument, maybe the most exotic ever - his very own Animal Theater which, 64 years after his death, people still call Durov's Corner.

The Theater's opening on the very eve of 1912 was a cause of great celebration for the Muscovites. Newspapers described it as a wonderful Christmas gift to the people. This is what Durov himself wrote about his brainchild: "They call my animal school a corner but in actual fact, it's a big house, complete with a terrace and a garden. We have an elephant here, among other things, like monkeys, sea lions, white bears, dogs, hares, badgers, hedgehogs and birds, so you can imagine how big the whole place really is! All these animals not only live here, we teach them do many things so they can perform in a circus. I too am always studying the animals and so we just learn from each other..."

Vladimir Durov is the founding father of the so-called "soft taming" method. Before him the tamers usually beat the animals into obedience. Durov changed all that, cajoling the animals, with treats and tenderness, into doing what he wanted them to do.

Vladimir Durov also studied the animals' physiology and at one point he even attended lectures conducted by the famous 19th century Russian physiologist Sechenov whose reflexes theory apparently influenced the methods which Vladimir Durov employed when working with his animals. This, for example, is how he himself described his work on the famous Pig in the Cluds number...

"I was then living in the country. One day I took my Khryushka pig out on the balcony where we had a pulley with belts. I wrapped the belts around the pig's body and started lifting it up into the air. The panic-stricken poor animal started wiggling its legs and squealing like crazy. I immediately pushed a bowl with food to its snout and, sniffing its tasty insides, the would-be pilot immediately relaxed and helped herself to the treat. There she was, eating and wiggling her legs in the air... Moving into stage two of our training session, I brought the belt-strapped piggy down and offered it a plate of food. As soon as the snout touched the plate, I pushed it aside. The pig reached out for the food, jumped off the podium and found itself hanging on the belts again... At this very moment the alarm clock started ringing. I repeated the sequence over and over again and Khryushka finally realized that she would be eating from my hands the moment she heard the alarm clock ringing... Running after the much-cherished food bowl, the pig jumped down from the podium any time the alarm clock sounded off. That's how she became a parachute jumper...

Word about Vladimir Durov's extraordinary exercises spread around like a brushfire with people telling each other tall tales about the tamer allegedly being able to send commands to his animals without saying a single word. Once performing in the town of Penza in Central Russia, Vladimir Durov asked the local governor for a permission to perform at the local circus...

"You know, it's really fascinating to see dogs do things they are mentally told to do", he said.

"It's a pity we can't prove it," the governor noted.

"We certainly can!," Durov said. "I can send someone out to bring in my dog Zapyataika and we can check it all out right away..." When they brought in the dog, the governor said:

"Let the dog pick up the brush from the table..." A moment later they saw the dog running in with the brush in mouth...

"Let the dog go into the next room and run its paw across the piano keys!" As you might have already guessed, the dog did just that...

Vladimir Durov not only was an outstanding circus artist and a tamer, he also was a sculptor. The figurines of the dinosaurs he made are still gracing the Durov's Corner theater in Moscow. The man was a gifted writer too and, while as a circus artist he launched a whole dinasty of famous tamers, his literary pursuits gave ample credit to his great grandmother Nadezhda Durova who was a really wonderful woman in every way. A hero of the 1912 Patriotic War with Napoleon, the famous girl gallantly fought in the cavalry pretending she was a man, Nadezhda Durova had her autobiography praised by none other than the great Alexander Pushkin himself... Moreover, the poet even published Durova's writings in his Sovremennik literary journal providing it with his own foreword...

And with a good reason too, because the story of a noblewoman who cut her hair and dressing up as a cossak ran away from her parents to join a cavalry unit, exited the readers' imagination. Emperor Alexander the First made Nadezhda Durova the first Russian woman to be awarded the St'George's Cross. The old story lives on with the films Once Upon a Time and A Hussar Ballad all highlighting the legendary cavalrywoman.

Nadezhda Durova had so much love for the animals, picking up homeless cats and dogs from all across the neighborhood and giving them food and shelter at her country house. This quality seems to have perfectly brushed off on Natalya Durova the woman who now runs the animal theater bearing the name of her great grandfarther Vladimir Durov. By the way, the Durov's Corner is the world's one and only such theater. Natalya Durova is a richly endowed tamer, actress and writer, a born leader deeply in love with her job...

We are keeping alive our family traditions of making people happy every day," she says, "because you just can't bring up real personalities without such holidays... Written on the coat of arms of our family which has been around for nearly five centuries now, you can see the words To Serve My Country... Which means serving your people. We've had some really outstanding people in our family. The guardian of the brothers Vladimir and Anatoly, who also was a well-known clown and tamer, just couldn't understand why they were both so short-tempered. He should have known that one of our ancestors was a close friend of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Anothert Durov, Sergei, who was a poet, gave freedom to his peasants long before the serfs were officially emancipated in 1861. The Durovs have always been on the side of the truth, hence their love for the colorful free for all that circus is really all about. Whatever they did bore the hallmark of genuine culture, that's why we the Durovs were often called the kings of the jokers and not the kings' jokers," Natalya Durova says.

Natalya's office is always full of life with its many parrots always eager to mince words with the even more numerous visitors.

There was a time, back at the turn of the 20th century, when greats like Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Chaliapine, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerkhold felt themselves honored to come to Durov's Corner. Vladimir Durov was one of the most talked-about people of his time. His great grand-daughter Natalya ranks among Russia's best known women whom the country's rich and famous are always happy to rub shoulders with, but, just like her famed great grandfather, her biggest award is the appreciation given her theater by the ordinary people. No matter what, Natalya remains true to her great grandfather's behest which says that the cost of a theater ticket should not exceed the price of a breadloaf...

The ticket prices here are really symbolical and one can only wonder how Natalya Durova manages to upkeep her 500 animals. But she does, and like Vladimir Durov, she continues giving preference to the carrot, not the stick, because she sincerely loves her kangaroos, wolves, elephants and raccoons. Sometimes it seems that that the life going on here is not real and, like in a fairly tale, the animals will start talking and working miracles. But, after talking to Natalya Durova and her 30-strong team, you realize that it is the people, after all, who are making life look like a fairly tale and the animals only help them in this effort...

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