Russian Pianists Eye East And West

Two promising young pianists visiting this country from Russia will return soon to Moscow not quite certain where they will spend the rest of their lives.

Vazgen Vartanyan and Dmitri Gordin gave a private recital at a birthday party in Sagaponack for Lukas Foss, the Bridgehampton composer and conductor. "They have enormous virtuosity," Mr. Foss said of the pair this week. "They are both terrific pianists."

The two are students at the venerable Moscow State Conservatory, the training ground for such piano virtuosos as Rachmaninoff, Gilels, and Richter. They are close friends as well as schoolmates, Mr. Vartanyan about to enter his fifth and last year of training, Mr. Gordin with two years to go.

Mirror Of Moscow

Last week, they took a quiet hour in Sag Harbor, where they were visiting friends, to talk about their American summer, spent mostly in New York City and on the East End. Both are serious, almost Tolstoyesque, with smiles hard to come by.

Staunchly committed to their music, they worry about what they described as their school's declining quality - in some ways a reflection of what is going on in their larger world, far beyond its walls.

"It's destiny, you know," said Mr. Vartanyan, a thoughtful, somewhat brooding 23-year-old of Armenian lineage, expressing a classically Russian fatalism. "I'm not sure that everything is up to you. Things happen. If something has to happen, it will happen."

Not The Same

Born in Moscow, he has played the piano since he was 8. His father is a retired sports coach, his mother an ophthalmologist. He has an older brother who has lived in Boston for six years.

"In the past," said Mr. Vartanyan, a veteran of several international piano competitions, the Moscow Conservatory had "the greatest teachers." But, he said, some of the most talented have died, and others have left.

"No one seems like a real musician," he lamented. "They don't have their heart in their teaching."

Why not? In part, perhaps, because members of the conservatory's faculty earn less than $100 a month - "and that's if they get paid," he said.

Just To Survive

He likened the faculty's situation to that of hundreds of Russian miners who have waited as long as a year for their wages. To survive, he explained, the music teachers give private lessons, leaving less time for attention to their conservatory students.

For that same $100, a tourist can buy an evening out at Moscow's clubs - unaffordable to most Russians, including the two young pianists, who receive a $12 a month stipend and said they were fortunate to be living with their parents. Student housing, they said, was "horrible - dirty and old."

"Either you have money, or there's nothing to do," said Mr. Vartanyan.

In the United States, on the other hand, the pair said they sensed "stability" - "lives with personal freedom."

Best For A Career

Mr. Gordin, 22, is Jewish, the only child of a high school math teacher and a gynecologist. Tall, handsome, and a heavy smoker, he has three times visited his paternal grandmother and an aunt, who moved to Israel in 1991. He has played the piano since he was 6.

"I love Israel. It's very special there," he said. "In nature, it has it all," desert in the south and verdant farmland to the north. But, he said, "I don't think I can make a career there."

On the other hand, he described his native Russia as "a jungle," an "uncivilized place" where people "are not good to each other," and where, even when they stand in line (which they do a lot), they press together, jockeying for room.

"It's tradition," said Mr. Gordin with a shrug. In America, he said, "people leave space."

In Moscow, he went on, "everyone is afraid" - of organized crime, a well-documented growing problem, and of being "shot on the street."

Missing Middle Class

"We have no middle class left," said Mr. Gordin. He said the assets of at least half the members of the moneyed class - about 1 percent of the population - came from "blood or crime money."

"There are a lot of really good people who deserve better," he concluded.

You don't have to be Russian to observe, as Mr. Vartanyan did, that artists have "a hard profession that makes you sensitive, and . . . vulnerable." Most Russians, though, "are looking at a wall," he said, "and they will live there all their lives."

Post-Soviet Russia

Not so, probably, for himself and his friend. "We know we can change our situation," said Mr. Vartanyan.

On Sunday, in a New York Times report on film-making in post-Soviet Russia, Naum Kleiman, the director of the Moscow Film Museum, confirmed the pianists' sentiments.

In an "old Russian tradition, going back to Peter the Great, we're in a constant war with the past, we're looking ahead with hope to the future, and we don't pay attention to the present," he said. "But the situation today is . . . new."

"Imagine being asleep for 70 years, waking up, and the first place you're standing is on the edge of a roof. It's a little hard to keep your balance."