(2 of 4)
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Playwright Neil Simon, Director Mike Nichols and Stars Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford pack a hamperful of laughs for this comic picnic about two newlyweds and their ups and downs in a six-flight walkup.
Off Broadway
DUTCHMAN, by LeRoi Jones, raises the color question to a new and distinctly terrifying pitch of violence. A sexually aggressive white girl and a sedate but inwardly seething Negro tell each other off in words that finally kill.
THE BLOOD KNOT links two South African half brothers in a twisted, tender but tormenting embrace that involves both races and the human race.
THE TROJAN WOMEN. The keening eloquence of body, mind and speech that graces this superb revival of the Euripidean classic is the unsellable cry of tragedy.
RECORDS
Chorus & Song
VERDI: FOUR SACRED PIECES (Angel). Just before he wrote Falstaff at 79, Verdi composed the Ave Maria and Laudi alia Vergine Maria; he finished the Te Deum and Stabat Mater at 83. Together they make a magnificent and devout peroration to the lifework of a man who was a freethinker in his youth. The Te Deum includes a most urgent prayer, and Verdi asked that the music be buried with him. Carlo Maria Giulini leads the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus (240 voices) in a stereophonic recording that matches the soaring splendor of the music.
SCHUBERT: DIE WINTERREISE (Angel; 2 LPs). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the greatest living lieder singer, sings some of Schubert's greatest lieder—a 24-part cycle about a rejected lover who sets out on a winter journey of despair, tantalized by everything he sees and dreams. These were Schubert's own favorites among his songs and were written just a year before his death at 31. Hermann Prey, a younger German baritone of growing renown, has also recorded Die Winterreise (Vox; 2 LPs). His voice is richer, but his interpretation is less subtle: while Fischer-Dieskau suffers a hundred varieties of hurts, Prey suffuses the whole in a single sorrow.
SONGS OF NED ROREM (Columbia) sung by Regina Sarfaty, Phyllis Curtin and others. Since the death of Poulenc, Indiana-born, 40-year-old Ned Rorem is probably the world's best composer of art songs. Here he puts to music the slithering of Theodore Roethke's Snake, the slow flow of Paul Goodman's The Lordly
Hudson, and Elizabeth Bishop's poem about Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the mentally ill, which becomes a chilling Baedeker of bedlam. Rorem has jettisoned tonality, but his rhythms are generally as even as pulse beats, and he lets voices rise and flow within their nat ural limits.
BACH: CANTATA NO. 51 (Decca). "Make a joyful noise unto God," sings Soprano Judith Raskin as she proceeds to do so, outshining a trumpet obbligato in a series of brilliant salvos. It is a virtuoso performance of some of Bach's most difficult and florid arias, and Thomas Dunn's Festival Orchestra of New York is almost too unobtrusive.