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SCHOENBERG: STRING QUARTET NO. 1 (Deutsche Grammophon). If Schoenberg had never opened the modern epoch of music in 1908 by pushing into the realm of atonality, his earlier tonal works would still command attention. This 1905 piece is a late Romantic creation bursting with ideas, ingenious in its complexity, touched with melancholy in spite of its energy. Although it contains four distinct, sonata-form subdivisions, it was conceived as a single movement. Schoenberg gave it coherence by modeling it after the first movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. The New Vienna String Quartet's performance is rich, although American tastes may prefer the precision of the Juilliard Quartet's reading.
SHOSTAKOVICH: QUARTET NO. 8 (London Stereo Treasury). The story goes that Russia's Borodin Quartet played this 1960 work for the composer in his Moscow home, hoping for pointers on their interpretation. Shostakovich was so moved that he wept, and the musicians quietly packed up and left. In this reissue of the Borodin's 1962 recording, few listeners will be affected as deeply as the composer, but many will have no trouble in recognizing Shostakovich's characteristic strengths along with his weaknesses. The piece abounds with hard-edge rhythms, clever quotations from his earlier work, occasional banal melodies, and such dubious programmatic effects as an imitation of a bomber under fire from antiaircraft guns—all welded together with Shostakovich's firm craftsmanship.
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Stanley Kubrick's cosmic parable of the history and future of man contains the most stunning technical effects and visual pyrotechnics in motion-picture history.
FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand is unmistakably the star of this rambling, almost anachronistic musical biography of Fanny Brice, whose brassy personality fits the leading lady like a feather boa.
THE BOFORS GUN. Superb acting, mainly by David Warner and Nicol Williamson, turns this slightly static film about life in the postwar British Army into a moving plea for individual freedom.
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. A subtle, probing performance by Alan Arkin as a deaf-mute brings poetry to this rather prosaic adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel.
RACHEL, RACHEL. Actor Paul Newman makes his debut as director in a quiet tale of a frustrated schoolteacher just entering middle age. His wife, Actress Joanne Woodward, gives the film an added stature with her achingly real portrayal of the heroine.
VOYAGE OF SILENCE. This deceptively simple story of a young Portuguese carpenter emigrating to Paris is a small masterpiece of compassionate observation and emotional restraint.
WARRENDALE. A magnificent, heartbreaking Canadian documentary that explores the troubled lives of a small group of emotionally disturbed children.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FIRST CIRCLE, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Using a model prison as an allegory for Soviet society, Russia's greatest living novelist constructs an endless labyrinth of despair.
GEORGE ELIOT, by Gordon Haight. This fond, scholarly biography finally does justice to a Victorian lady novelist whose life and works both deserve it.