Squeezing Out a Living : Music: In Russia, accordionist Nikolai Tarasov was famous. He’ll show O.C. audiences why Saturday.

An immigrant leaves his troubled native country behind and travels thousands of miles to find a better life in America.

It’s a story older than the United States itself. And it’s the story of Russian accordionist Nikolai Tarasov.

In reverse.

A musician with Russia’s internationally renowned Moiseyev Dance Company for 18 years, Tarasov had it made. Fame, wealth (relatively speaking) and job security.

But four years ago he left all that behind and moved to Los Angeles. Now he repairs leaky roofs in apartment buildings and studies English by day; at night and on weekends he plays his beloved bayan accordion on the street for the pocket change of passersby.

He gave it all up for a reason even older than the American Dream: love.

Unlike many natives of the former Soviet Union, Tarasov, who plays during the dinner portion of “An Evening of Russian Culture” at Chapman University in Orange on Saturday, had never dreamed of coming West.

“Nikolai is very Russian and has a very profound love of Russia,” said his wife of four years, Leeza Vinnichenko, an actress who was born in Russia but raised in the United States.

“He never wanted to leave Russia, never fantasized about living in the West,” she said by phone from their home in Los Angeles. “This is not work-related at all. This is a love story.”

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Tarasov and Vinnichenko met while the Moiseyev was on a U.S. tour in 1989, brought together, naturally, by his accordion. He had brought it to a party and she requested that he play some folk tunes to which, she recalls, she accompanied him by singing off-key. Later he asked her if she knew where Charlie Chaplin had made his films.

Recalled Vinnichenko: “I said, ‘Of course I do, I live a few blocks from there.’ It’s where A&M; Records is, and there’s 30 feet of cement there with Chaplin’s footprints. I told him I’d stood in Charlie Chaplin’s footsteps. We left the party and I conned the man at the (A&M;) gate to let us through. We took pictures, and it was the biggest thrill for him. . . . He’d loved Chaplin since childhood.”

In 1990, Tarasov returned for a month’s vacation, and in 1991 he and Vinnichenko were married.

“The adjustments for him here are very hard. It’s a struggle,” Vinnichenko said. “He’s having a hard time with the English language. Getting work is tough.”

But Tarasov finds a way.

“I have a job,” Tarasov, 45, said in halting English. He said he fixes apartments, “roofs and ceiling leaks. . . . In the evening I play at Music Center.”

In his homeland, he would have been playing inside prestigious music centers; now he must be content to entertain concert-goers on their way to hear other musicians play.

On any given night he can be found squeezing out such familiar Western pop tunes as “Strangers in the Night” alongside Russian folk and classical compositions displaying blinding technical virtuosity. If listeners toss him pocket change in appreciation, so much the better.

Tarasov began studying accordion at a music school in Moscow at the age of 7 and studied there for 10 years. He was a member of the orchestra for the Moiseyev company (a.k.a. the State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance of USSR), the first such troupe to “break the Iron Curtain,” Vinnichenko said.

“(Impresario) Sol Hurok brought them here in 1957 on a cultural exchange,” she said. “It was a little crack in the Iron Curtain. They took the country by storm.”

He has found work here as a musician occasionally.

He tours twice yearly with the San Francisco-based Neva Russian Dance Ensemble and has played on several motion picture soundtracks, including “Love Affair.” (When Warren Beatty and Annette Bening go out on the deck, the guy playing the accordion music they’re dancing to is Tarasov.) He has performed with “crazy Russian folk ‘n’ roll” group Limpopo, which also plays Saturday at Chapman, and can be heard on Limpopo’s album.

He also recently appeared in a TV commercial for AT&T.;

“I went out for the audition; Nikolai got the job,” Vinnichenko said with a laugh. “I was supposed to sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ in Russian, and he’d only come to accompany me. They’d had no thought of an accordion until they heard him play. . . .”

That’s typical of what Russian- or European-educated accordionists find when they reach American shores, she said.

“The members of these troupes--these people were considered the elite in Russia,” Vinnichenko said. “They lived very well. They had no needs. He lived exceedingly well in Russia.

“He knew that if he came to the West he could never attain the economic status and position in society that he had in Russia,” she said. “In the West, the accordion is an instrument of jest. In Russia, (if you play) the accordion, you’re considered a musician. It’s the cultural instrument. The balalaika and accordion are Russia.”

Life in the West has nurtured in Tarasov and Vinnichenko at least one key component of the American Dream: the hope that their situation will improve.

“The accordion has for years had such a square reputation, because of Lawrence Welk, ‘a-one and a-two’ and the champagne, you know,” Vinnichenko said. “It’s starting to no longer be a joke, but to be taken seriously as a wonderful new sound. It’s no longer ‘Lady of Spain, I adore you.’ . . . Paul McCartney’s even used an accordion.

“And Nikolai’s repertoire is so extensive--he’s started to do Beatles,” she noted. “The accordion will again find its place in the sun.”

* Bayanist Nikolai Tarasov and Limpopo perform Saturday at “An Evening of Russian Culture” at Chapman University, Argyros Forum, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. 7 p.m. $30, includes Russian dinner. Sponsored by Chapman’s International Student Services office. Net proceeds benefit student scholarships. (714) 997-6829.