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JUDITH. The late French Dramatist Jean Giraudoux cleverly plays Freudian and Shavian hob with the apocryphal tale of the Jewish heroine who saved Israel by killing the Assyrian general Holofernes. In the title role, Rosemary Harris is tartly, tenderly, elusively and enchantingly feminine.
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE has the tensile strength of some of Arthur Miller's least pretentious and least self-conscious writing. Robert Duvall plays the doomed longshoreman hero with the uncompromising force of a body blow.
THE ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE. In these two one-acters, Britain's Harold Pinter conjures up menace with the easy authority of a Hitchcock and poses Pirandelphic conundrums about the nature of truth and reality.
RECORDS
Opera
BELLINI: NORMA (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). Joan Sutherland is too bland an actress for the role of the passionate Druid priestess, but there is nothing tame about her voice. It soars effortlessly along the arching melodies, pours forth the Casta Diva like a shower of silver, and even when demanding blood and carnage, never turns shrill. Mezzo Marilyn Horne is Sutherland's rival in love and her runner-up in bel canto; understandably, with two such prima donnas singing for his favors, Tenor John Alexander sounds a little overwhelmed. With the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Richard Bonynge.
STRAVINSKY: THE RAKE'S PROGRESS (Columbia; 3 LPs). The music is a slightly dissonant, eerie echo of 18th century opera, atinkle with harpsichord, but the libretto, by W. H. Auden and Chester Kailman, though set in Hogarth's London, is a 20th century nightmare. Tom Rakewell, goaded by Nick Shadow, the devil, marries a bearded lady to assert his freedom from both passion and reason, and dies in the madhouse thinking he is Adonis. Tenor Alexander Young is a lyrical, sensitive rake-in-progress, Baritone John Reardon a sly devil, and Soprano Judith Raskin is sweet-voiced in the pallid role of Anne Truelove, Tom's lost innocent. Stravinsky himself conducts.
MOZART: THE MAGIC FLUTE (Angel; 3 LPs). Otto Klemperer leads the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus a bit too deliberately, as though savoring all the riches at his disposal, which admittedly are considerable. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig are two of the unnamed Ladies, and they make the trios a delight. Tenor Nicolai Gedda, singing Tamino, never sounded better. The two leading sopranos, though virtually unknown in the U.S., should be so no longer. They are Lucia Popp, the coldly crystalline coloratura Queen of the Night, and Gundula Janowitz, a meltingly sweet and pure Pamina.
HANDEL: ALCINA HIGHLIGHTS (London). Six soloists appear one after another to sing arias, the coloring and texture of their voices closely contrasted like flowers in a mixed bouquet. The sopranos are Joan Sutherland, Graziella Sciutti and Mirella Freni; the mezzos, Teresa Berganza and Monica Sinclair; the tenor, Luigi Alva. Sciutti is perhaps the most eloquent of all as she sings Believe in My Unhappiness.