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STRAVINSKY: FOUR ETUDES & LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS (Nonesuch). Pierre Boulez is a protean figure in postwar French music —a first-rate conductor and composer whose creative roots are in the music of Debussy and Stravinsky and the poetry of Baudelaire. No wonder, then, that his rendering of these classics has an almost uncomfortable intensity and excitement—almost as if they were being composed before the listener's ear. Boulez' musical aim is to expose "the naked flesh of feeling," and he does.
MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 4 (Columbia). This glorious work contains Mahler's song "Das himmlische Leben," and George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra recreate the Teutonic paradise. Judith Raskin, who sings the three soprano solos, sounds warm and free, yet her precise technique never allows a hint of bombast. "St. Cecilia with all her relatives are the excellent court musicians," goes the final refrain of the song, and the Cleveland and Miss Raskin could not be better described.
CINEMA
LE BONHEUR. A fascinating Gallic fable of infidelity, drenched with springtime color and quite dispassionate in its point of view toward a handsome young carpenter who rather casually betrays his beloved first wife but finds equal happiness with her successor.
MANDRAGOLA. Machiavelli's ribald Renaissance classic about a Florentine lady's virtue, directed with plenty of low period humor by Italy's Alberto Lattuada and played as high comedy by Rosanna Schiaffino and a sporty cast.
LES BONNES FEMMES. In a perceptive drama by French Director Claude Chabrol (The Cousins), the pursuit of happiness leads four hopeful shopgirls into some of the most bizarre and horrifying byways of Paris.
MORGAN! David Warner and Vanessa Red grave brighten a black British comedy in which a fey young artist is destroyed by his emotional dependence on Karl Marx, King Kong and his former wife.
HARPER. A millionaire disappears, and Private Eye Paul Newman beats the perfumed shrubbery of Southern California to find him. Among the shady ladybirds he flushes in passing are Julie Harris, Lauren Bacall and Shelley Winters.
SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. The vestiges of British influence in India color a wry, graceful comedy about a young actress (Felicity Kendal) who tours the provinces doing Shakespeare and finds her reallife romantic role more difficult to play.
BORN FREE. The life and loves of Elsa the lioness are joyously re-created in a movie version of the bestselling book by her biographer, Joy Adamson.
DEAR JOHN. Sex precedes love for a lusty sea captain (Jarl Kulle) and a lonely waitress (Christina Schollin) in a memorable film by Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren.
THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Under Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia, a Chaplinesque carpenter (Josef Kroner) endures a Kafkaesque nightmare when his friendship with a harmless old button seller (Ida Kamińska) is tested by an order for the deportation of Jews.
BOOKS
Best Reading 1066: THE STORY OF A YEAR, by Denis Butler. It is the year of Hastings, and the story of the battlefield where one King (William the Conqueror) was spawned and another (King Harold I of England) died.