Music: Step Right Up to the Great Culture-Kultura Bazaar

Vladimir Horowitz has been there, filling the halls in Moscow and Leningrad with his Olympian mastery of the piano. Coming here this week--first to Washington, then to Los Angeles and New York City--will be some of the most beautiful sights earth-bound folk are ever likely to see: paintings by, among others, Cézanne, Matisse, Monet and Renoir. "Matisse is one of the giants of the 20th century," says J. Carter Brown, director of Washington's National Gallery. "But many of his early works have been locked up in the Soviet Union.[*] No other single Matisse is as wonderful as The Red Room [formally titled Harmony in Red], and it will be seen here for the first time!"

The Geneva summit meeting of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev last November made little progress on the major issues dividing East and West. But to lovers of the arts it was a signal success: it brought about the first U.S.-Soviet cultural-exchange agreement since 1973 and made possible the trips of Horowitz, the paintings from Soviet museums and many other performances and art exhibits.

Indeed, the exchanges, which had ended more than six years ago with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, resumed almost immediately. Rag Dolly, a children's play produced by the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts in Albany, won high praise when it visited Moscow in January. Now there is talk that Producer David Merrick will dispatch a production for grownups, his Broadway hit 42nd Street. Soviet Poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko was recently in the U.S., talking to such moviemakers as Francis Ford Coppola and Warren Beatty about trading films. "Soviet audiences don't know contemporary American cinema," he says, "and Soviet films are not seen in America except in special cinema clubs and art theaters." Meanwhile, the Ganelin Trio, an avant-garde Soviet jazz group--yes, Soviet jazz!--is scheduled to tour 14 American cities in June and July. The Moiseyev folk dancers will probably appear at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House in September, and the Bolshoi Ballet will arrive in the U.S. next year.

It is hard to exaggerate the excitement the agreement has generated in the cultural circles of both superpowers. American balletomanes are eagerly examining the schedule of Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, which has not danced in the U.S. in 22 years, scanning cast lists and hoping for a glimpse of Altynai Assylmuratova, its much touted 24-year-old ballerina. "The Bolshoi is better known over here and has a more flamboyant style," says Jane Hermann, director of presentations for the Metropolitan Opera. "But absence has made the Kirov almost mysterious. People want to see where a Baryshnikov and a Nureyev came from."

The Soviets seem no less impatient to watch America strut its stuff. "They have always had an enormous interest in Americana, especially in black music, jazz and avant-garde theater," says Samuel Niefeld, vice president of Columbia Artists Management, one of the leading classical-music agencies in the U.S. "They use them as examples of the decadence of our nation, but they're totally mesmerized by them."