© THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 8, 1993

Kurt Vonnegut's Reinterpretation of ''L' Histoire du Soldat''
By ALLAN KOZINN

The drawing card on the New York Philomusica Chamber Ensemble program on Thursday evening at Alice Tully Hall was Stravinsky's ''Histoire du Soldat,'' with a new text composed for the occasion by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Because the text and music in a music-drama work are so closely intertwined, replacing a work's text is no small thing. In this case the gestures, language and spirit of Stravinsky's music mirror the Soldier's progress and describe the odd, supernatural circumstances in the original text by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. For anyone who knows and loves the work, both elements make crucial points. Mr. Vonnegut has not merely updated or tinkered with the Ramuz text, but has jettisoned it entirely, offering as justification his belief that it did not adequately reflect the state of the world when the work was composed, toward the end of World War I.

"What the people have to say in between Stravinsky's brilliant little outbursts up to now has less than nothing to do with the gruesome and humiliating life of any soldier in any war in any time," Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his notes. "I cannot understand how Stravinsky, in exile from his native Russia but of military age when he wrote the music, could have found acceptable words which were so unresponsive to a war then going on in which 65 million persons had been mobilized and 35 million were becoming casualties."

Mr. Vonnegut is not the first to mention this incongruity, but Stravinsky's use of the Ramuz text is really not so difficult to understand. Stravinsky did not believe, as Mr. Vonnegut apparently does, that any work written in wartime and involving a soldier must be about the horrors of combat. The Ramuz text, based on Russian folk tales, is not about war at all, nor about the soldierly side of soldiering, nor even about the real world. It is a somewhat more mystical morality tale about the Devil's snares and about human failings of a nonbellicose nature.

Surely Mr. Vonnegut is toying with us: one does not become as esteemed a novelist as he is without recognizing such basic universal archetypes and the fact that their applicability transcends historical circumstances. But Mr. Vonnegut has his own agenda, and invited to present his vision of what ''Histoire du Soldat'' should have been, he transformed the magical tale of the Soldier and the Devil into the tale of a World War II deserter who is imprisoned and executed, basing it loosely on the story of Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier executed (in 1945, for desertion) since the Civil War.

In place of Ramuz's naive, easily misled Soldier on leave, Mr. Vonnegut offers a wisecracking deserter who is confronted by a General, rather than the Devil. The other characters -- a Military Policeman and a Red Cross Girl -- are of little account. He has a trial, he is visited briefly in the stockade by the Red Cross Girl, he is shot, and that's about all there is to it, apart from an unadorned synopsis of the Slovik story, offered as a coda. The rhymed text is full of bad puns and descriptions of battle scenes so cliched as to be impotent.

Stravinsky's music, in this version, is treated as unrelated and not terribly consequential background music. It did, however, get a crisp, precise reading from the Philomusica players, and it was difficult not to imagine the ghosts of Stravinsky and Ramuz hovering over the ensemble and glowering at the proceedings.

The piece was economically directed and staged by Pat Burke, who used four triangular modules turned different ways to suggest the headquarters, prison and execution yard. Eli Wallach as the General, Martin Vidnovic as the Military Policeman and Ann Reinking as the Red Cross Girl delivered their lines without much passion, and often seemed to be giving their first reading of the script. Jim Bracchita's soldier, though crudely overplayed, was at least livelier.

The rest of the program -- a crystalline account of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 (K. 271), with Robert Levin's feisty rendering of the solo line, and Henri Dutilleux's spiky ''Citations'' (1991) -- showed off the considerable polish of the freelance players who make up the Philomusica group.

© THE NEW YORK TIMES