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HEIFETZ: SAINT-SAENS, SONATA NO. 1 (RCA Victor). As Professor Higgins once observed, Frenchmen don't actually care what they do, only how they pronounce it. And Charles Camille Saint-Saens is nothing if not French. "The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colors and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music," he once declared. Most of his music, including Sonata No. 1 For Piano ' and Violin, is more form than substance. Still, Jascha Heifetz plays it well, and includes satisfying little pieces by four other composers (Sibelius, Wieniawski, Rachmaninoff and Falla) on side 2.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: COMPLETE PI ANO MUSIC (2 LPs; CBS). This set is worth acquiring as much for Stockhausen's notes on the album cover as for the music itself. Not that the composer writes revealingly about his art ("All the Piano Pieces V-X are characterized by groups of notes around nuclear notes, occurring before, with or after them."). Instead, he spends the space discussing the fascinating food his soloist, Aloys Kontarsky, consumed on the days when the album was being recorded. On the groaning board: jugged deer with Spdtzle; marrow consomme; steak Tartare; saltimbocca romana ("He sent the rice back"); Movenpick ice-cream tart; Haldengut Pilsen beer; Cognac; Coca-Cola; Johannisberg wine, and one Bloody Mary. During one recording session, confides Stockhausen, "every movement that Kontarsky made caused his piano stool to creak on the wooden floor," a difficulty that caused a one-and-a-half-hour delay in the recording of Stockhausen's staccato, rather eerie Music
CINEMA
THE CLIMAX. Ugo Tognazzi gives an exquisitely humane performance as a three-family man (one wife, two mistresses, six children) in a bittersweet comedy produced, written and directed by Italy's Pietro Germi.
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS. In this story of a young man beginning his working life as a train dispatcher, Czech Director Jiff Menzel mixes the real and the surreal, ribaldry and pathos, comedy and tragedy, yet keeps the film squarely on the track all the way.
UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. Sandy Dennis is expert, as always. But it is the kids themselves (recruited from the New York City streets) who give the ring of truth to this glossy rendering of Bel Kaufman's novel about a teacher's problems in a slum-area high school. THE THIEF OF PARIS. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a burglar in turn-of-the-century France, manages only to steal the picture, which, because of its disjointedness, just misses being worth the effort.
THE BIG CITY. Satyajit Ray has taken a simple tale of six people living in a Calcutta tenement and fashioned an eloquent testimonial to the courage of ordinary people facing ordinary problems.
BOOKS
Best Reading
YEARS OF WAR, 1941-1945; FROM THE MORGENTHAU DIARIES, by John Morton Blum, uses the detailed personal diaries of F.D.R.'s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., to trace the career of that imperious New Dealer from 1941, when he organized a wartime fiscal-fitness program for the U.S. economy, through the 1945 "Morgenthau Plan" for emasculating and dismembering conquered Germany, which cost him his job.