Khachaturian

Ed Sullivan introduced a generation of TV babies to Aram Khachaturian's propulsive "Saber Dance," the musical backdrop to his show's popular plate-spinning act. Like German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, the subject of Istvan Szabo's TAKING SIDES (2003), Khachaturian had the misfortune to live in interesting times: His career spanned the idealistic birth of the Russian Revolution to its degeneration into Stalin's brutal and viciously fickle purges, and his involvement with the Soviet regime was complex and controversial. Documentarian Peter Rosen concludes that the composer tried to work from within a system of which he had high hopes that were later dashed; he spent...