1 Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich credits recent Soviet moves toward artistic freedom for his plan to present the world premiere of a long-suppressed musical satire written by the late composer Dmitri Shostakovich to ridicule the Stalinist regime.
2 The unpublished, 15-minute theatrical piece entitled 'Rayok,' Russian for 'Little Eden,' will be performed for the first time Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, with Rostropovich at the piano leading a cast of four bass singers and a small mixed chorus.
3 Three additional performances will be given at the Kennedy Center through Tuesday, and Shostakovich's son, Maxim, a conductor who defected to the United States in 1981, was expected to be in the audience for a Sunday afternoon performance in New York's Carnegie Hall.
4 Rostropovich, the Soviet-born music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, apparently acquired a copy of the score and libretto for 'Rayok' only recently.
5 At a news conference Tuesday, he refused to say how or exactly when it fell into his hands.
6 'There are a lot of counterfeits around,' he said, 'but I'm willing to put my life on the line that this is Shostakovich's music.'
7 He said Shostakovich secretly wrote 'Rayok' in 1960 to express his contempt for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who had died seven years earlier, and two senior Kremlin bureaucrats who had led a harsh ideological crackdown on Soviet composers, writers and artists in the late 1940s.
8 Rostropovich, a close friend of Shostakovich for more than 20 years, said that until recently it would have meant imprisonment or the death penalty to perform 'Rayok' in the Soviet Union.
9 But under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he said, 'now you can do this even in the Soviet Union.'
10 Rostropovich said he knows of no plans for a Soviet performance of the work, although he said the late composer's family is negotiating to have it published.
11 He said he has no fears his performances of the long-hidden piece might jeopardize the safety of the Shostakovich family, as it might have in the recent past.
12 'If I thought this would make it difficult for the family, I wouldn't do it,' he said.
13 Rostropovich said the ability to present 'Rayok' without fear of repercussions is another sign that 'now the Soviet Union has truly changed and this is a happy time.'
14 He said Gorbachev's repudiation of the excesses of the Stalin era vindicates Shostakovich's criticism.
15 'Finally the arts are being turned over to people who understand them,' Rostropovich said.
16 'No one in the Politburo is being a musical teacher to artists.'
17 The Shostakovich work is a scathing put-down of Stalin and of Dmitri T. Shepilov and Andrei A. Zhdanov, the high-level officials of the Soviet Communist Party who led the cultural purge that began in 1947.
18 According to Rostropovich, the musical satire is based on speeches given at a special meeting of the party's Central Committee in 1948, where prominent Soviet composers -- including Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev -- were denounced for 'formalistic tendencies' and directed to write music of 'realism' for the masses.
19 Shostakovich privately held the musical bureaucrats in contempt as crude and ignorant.
20 He publicly confessed he was guilty of their charges and was kicked out of the Moscow Conservatory.
21 Rostropovich himself fled his homeland in 1974, the year before Shostakovich died in Moscow, and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1978, the same year he was hired by the National Symphony.
22 Although heartened by Gorbachev's reform policies, Rostropovich said he remains an official non-person in the Soviet Union and has no plans to return.

Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich credits recent Soviet moves toward artistic freedom for his plan to present the world premiere of a long - suppressed musical satire written by the late composer Dmitri Shostakovich to ridicule the Stalinist regime .
recent Soviet moves toward artistic freedom
What moves toward artistic freedom?