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BRAHMS: LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES (RCA Victor). To a world that has waltzed to the elegant confections of the Strauss family, Brahms's Liebeslieder (with lyrics of Georg Daumer) may seem a bit heavy in a distinctly Teutonic way. But they have their own solid, unpretentious virtues: warmth and vigor that suggest Saturday night at a comfortable old Bierstube rather than a glittering ballroom. The performance by the Robert Shaw Chorale is robust, the piano of Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir downright athletic.
VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES: A WORLD OF SONG (Angel). All these songs are well known, and several are chestnuts. All the more wonder that Soprano de los Angeles has produced a fresh and enlightening record. She gives La Paloma a relaxed performance, full of a sly, feminine humor; her gypsy songs are sung head-on with open, hearty tones. On the other side. Ich Liebe Dich, Brahms's Lullaby and Songs My Mother Taught Me get serene, tender treatment. Many of these songs have been recorded by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Angel), with whom De los Angeles shares the title of Queen of Song, but their styles are completely different. De los Angeles is intimate and seemingly effortless; Schwarzkopf, even in the simplest lullaby, endlessly subtle.
CINEMA
BORN FREE. Elsa the lioness, tamed and untamed, bounds through a vivid movie re-creation of Joy Adamson's bestseller, superbly photographed in Kenya.
MORGAN! A misfit artist tries to woo back his divorced wife by behaving like King Kong in an offbeat comedy that might easily have run amuck except for polished clowning by David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, two of Britain's showiest young stars.
HARPER. Private-eye melodrama is revived in lively style by Paul Newman as a gum-chewing gumshoe whose search for a missing millionaire implicates Lauren Bacall, Arthur Hill and Shelley Winters.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW.
The life of Christ in a fresh and fascinating film based wholly on Scripture and played as an act of faith by a nonprofessional cast under Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. U.S. Director James Ivory takes a wry, wistful look at fading British influence in India while ostensibly concerned with a love triangle that disrupts an English Shakespearean troupe on tour.
DEAR JOHN. The urgent biochemistry between a robust sailor (Jarl Kulle) on the make and a girl (Christina Schollin) who probably won't say no is analyzed to near perfection by Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren, a sensitive defender of the thesis that sex sometimes precedes love.
THE GROUP. The Roosevelt era is brought giddily to life by eight delightful young actresses in this entertaining movie version of Mary McCarthy's tattletale bestseller about some of the surprises in store for Vassar's class of '33.
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. In a small, poignant masterwork from Czechoslovakia, Nazi terror eventually poisons the friendship between a warmhearted old Jewess (Ida Kamińska) and a decent Aryan nonentity (Josef KrÓner) whose courage falters under stress.
BOOKS
Best Reading
PAPA HEMINGWAY, by A. E. Hotchner. An old friend paints a wonderfully perceptive portrait of the writer who was both a symbol and an idol to his generation.