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STRAVINSKY: SYMPHONY OF PSALMS (Columbia). "God must not be praised in fast, forte music," Stravinsky once declared, and he holds to deliberate tempos as he conducts the CBC Symphony and the Festival Singers of Toronto in his imposing setting for Psalms 150 and 40. In notes on the upside-down pyramid of fugues and other components of this elaborate musical structure he created in 1930, he explains: "One hopes to worship God with a little art if one has any."
BACH: CANTATA NO. 211 (Nonesuch). Wearing his worldly wig, Bach wrote a miniature operetta called the Coffee Cantata. A father threatens every punishment to save his daughter from vice, but she persists: "If I don't get my coffee three times a day, I'm like a piece of dried-up meat." Coffee, she sings, is "better than a thousand kisses." A gay sprig of baroque music, the cantata is given an airy and stylish performance by the soloists, chorus and chamber orchestra of Radio Berlin.
CINEMA
THAT MAN FROM RIO. Jean-Paul Belmondo ducks poisoned darts, outwits mad scientists, and narrowly escapes a Brazilian crocodile in Director Philippe de Broca's wonderfully wacky distillation of all the adventure movies ever made.
NOTHING BUT THE BEST. In this cheeky, stylish, often mordantly funny variation on Room at the Top, an aristocratic wastrel (Denholm Elliott) teaches a lowly British clerk (Alan Bates) how to attain Establishment status.
THE ORGANIZER. Marcello Mastroianni is superb as a scraggly 19th century revolutionary in Director Mario (Big Deal on Madonna Street) Monicelli's timeless, beautifully photographed, warmly human drama about a textile strike in Turin.
THE NIGHT WATCH. In this taut French thriller, five criminals trying to tunnel out of a Paris prison learn that a man can scratch and claw his way to freedom from everything but himself.
BECKET. Church-state conflict turns friends to foes in a glowing screen spectacle based on Jean Anouilh's drama about England's 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury (Richard Burton), who dies defying King Henry II (Peter O'Toole).
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. This dry spoof of Ian Fleming's fiction follows Secret Agent 007 (Sean Connery) to Istanbul where wine, women and wrongs are swiftly and impeccably Bonded.
THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT. A pair of teen-age furies pursue Concert Pianist Peter Sellers around Manhattan with hilarious results.
THE SERVANT. All candlelight and gleaming crystal, this smooth essay on class distinction in Britain casts Dirk Bogarde as the malicious valet who trades places with his master.
THE SILENCE. Lightning bolts of Ingmar Bergman's genius illuminate a dark, chilling allegory in which two women and a child travel to a city abounding in lust, loneliness and death.
Best Reading
JEFFERSON AND CIVIL LIBERTIES, by Leonard Levey. The thesis of this well-documented polemic is that Jefferson was not the civil libertarian he has been made out to be. He was not above suspending freedoms when it suited his purpose, and to enforce his unpopular embargo, he, in effect, made war on Americans.