Page Two

THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Saturday, January 29, 1972

Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Saturday, January 29, 1972
ii.


Berlin Octet: Dispassionate performance

By CARL PETER MEYER
The Berlin Philharmonic Octet
played in Rackham Hall last
night and displayed beauty of
ensemble if little else.
They opened the program with
Rossini's Sonata a Quattro No. 3
in C for two violins, cello and
double bass written in 1804 when

Rossini was just twelve. It is an unfortunately the performance

extraordinary work showing no
signs of immaturity, highlighted
by an "opera buffa" like set of
variations in the last movement
in which even the double bass
(finely played by Rainer Zep-
peritz) gets into the solo action.
It's all sweetness and light but

was not. Above all it did not
display that important mercur-
ial quality inherent in the work.
The players betrayed a lack of
real involvement and the work
did not move me the way it can.
There were also some intona-
tion problems from the first

Combining art and politics

violinist as well as slight en-
semble discrepancies.
Ten years Beethoven's junior,
Konrad Kreutzer outlived him
by twenty years, and is known
primarily as an opera composer;
having written few instrument-
al works: The Grand Septet, op.
62, is directly modeled on Beeth-
oven's very popular Septet in
E-Flat, op. 20, sharing instru-
mentation and sequence of
movement as well as key. It is a
somewhat rambling work in six
movements lasting half an hour
and, needless to say, does not
display the beauty, concise wit,
or balance of formal elements
of Beethoven's Septet. Never-
theless there are some delicious
moments highlighted by the in-
terplay of many beautiful mel-
odies with operatic drama. The
performance displayed fine wind
playing and cohesive ensemble,
but needed more life and a more
generous display of emotional

involvement. By the way, the
Kreutzer is available on record
in a performance by the Vienna
Octet in a looser, but altogether
more effervescent reading on
London CS6672 coupled with
the Berwald "Stor" Septet.
The Schubert Octet, one of
the great works of the reper-
toire, can suffer from longueurs
if played too slowly and too
lyrically. For me it needs a per-
formance that stresses the arch-
itecture but does not lose sight
of the lyrical elements. Cloying-
ness can kill the work.
Last night's performance was
generally too lyrical and not
incisive- enough and a certain
amount of passion and Involve-
ment was again missing. There
were however some beautiful
moments notably in the first
andante, and the group dis-
played great beauty of tone
throughout.

ANDNOW
AWORD
FROM OUR'
gdvw~tislng c o yEtribtd L U4 W
advrtish public good !+niCsi04
''''''"u"****

NINTH PARTY CONGRESS
Sino-Soviet Border Dispute
TWO FILMS ON CHINA, WITH SPEAKER
BENEFIT FOR THE ROBERT F. WILLIAMS
LEGAL DEFENSE FUND
R. C. Auditorium-East Quad
Sat., Jan. 29 8 P.M. Donation $1.00

4

I

By LINDA DREEBEN
"Theater for black people is
a tool to teach. If it does not do
that it does nothing. I do not
believe in art for art's sake."
This statement of the politics
of art clearly points to Artee
Young's view of theater - par-
ticularly black theater - and
the role she sees for art and the
artist in contemporary life.
Young, a graduate student in
the speech department, is the
director of the University Play-
er's current production, Cere-

monies in Dark Old Men.
"I want good art on the stage,"
Young continues, "but I want
it to say something. Veiling a
message in art makes it palat-
able."
Young believes she is saying
something -- and saying it to
both blacks and whites in the
community - through her di-
rection of Lonne Elder's Cere-
monies.
Young views Elder's play as
universal, one which "under-
stands the frustration of the


cinema
A soapy'NotIon
Pon

i ,

By RICHARD GLATZNER
Kesey-lovers beware; the film
currently playing at the Michi-
gan Theatre has more to do with
Peyton Place than the book it
borrows its title from. For Paul
Newman, in adapting (can the
sense of the word be stretched
this drastically?) Sometimes a
Great Notion for the screen has
condensed, distorted, and twist-
ed the novel to create a film
that's very reminiscent of the
brand of Hollywood hokum our
parents accepted as "adult" mo-
vie fare before they'd ever
heard of an X rating or a photo-
graphed bare breast; it's that
type of sprawling, multi-char-
actered 1950's drama-adventure
that was considered mature not
for what it depicted, but for
what it implied.
The film's situation-a tradi-
tional backwooods lumberjack
family, headed by rough-tough
no-nonsense Henry Stamper
(Henry Fonda) living resiliently
in Oregon-is a classic back-
drop for an epic soaper, and
things develop smoothly in the
best Home from the Hill fashion
when Leeland Samper (Michael
Sarrazin), Henry's university-
educated son whom no one has
seen for years, returns home.
Sure enough, this catalyst starts
the sparks flying, providing us
with such juicy bits as an unful-
filled love between Lee and sis-
ter-in-law Viv (Lee Remick), an
Oedipal skeleton-in-the closet,
and two or three deaths along
the wqay, all served up in the
most slickly muddled Hollywood
manner.
Understandably, m a n y of
Tinseltown's veterans, unwilling
to totally resign themselves to
television, have flocked around
this vehicle. Henry Fonda as
Papa Stamper (a catastrophic-
ally awful casting coup), whe-
ther noisily waking his family
at 4:30 A.M. or bellowing such
things as, "Looks to me like
some kinda. New York fairy," is
less convincing than he was
selling Kodaks. Lee Remick and
Paul Newman (as Hank, Viv's
husband) are, in the great Hol-
lywood tradition, Lee Remick
and Paul Newman. And on the
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technical side, the producers
have enlisted the aid of Edith
Head and Henry Mancini to add
just the right touch of kitsch
to the rusticity.
Yet in spite of what Mancini's
folksy guitar pluckin' with vio-
lins in the background might
imply, Sometimes a Great No-
tion has not been produced in a
cultural vacuum, and occasional
signs of the year in which the
film was made do manage to
seep through.
Similar to McCabe and Mrs.
Miller is Notion's incredibly
virile and robust Pacific North-
west scenery; those evergreens,
mountains, and silver rivers are
timeless in their beauty, barely
touched by Today. And like its
scenery, the real charm of
Sometimes a Great Notion lies
not in the bits of contemporary
culture that have crept in, but
in the unmodern, in the seren-
dipity of discovering a 1950's
movie in 1972, a Johnnie Ray
album in a stack of Grateful
Dead. And unlike that other,
very self-consciously 1950's mo-
vie around, The Last Picture
Show, Notion is pure and inno-
cent, completely unaware of
just what an anachronism it is.

black man in this country. The
forces the people in the play
feel tearing at them are the
same all black people feel."
Young chose Ceremonies par-
tially because it- was written for
mixed audiences. "A play writ-
ten specifically for black audi-
ences couldn't be done here,"
she remarks. "Too many people
would be alienated."
"Black theater exists for black
people," she says. "I'm not say-
ing that whites cannot profit
from it. But black theater is
written from a black frame of
reference and logically only
black people can thoroughly
identify with the situation the
playwright has set up."
In Ceremonies, Elder depicts
the situation of a black family
in Harlem - Mr. Parker, his
daughter Adele, and his two
sons. "What we should general-
ize," Young notes, "are the frus-
trations and political and econ-
omic pressures that pull at and
try to destroy black families in
the country."
The Parker men react to these
pressures by turning to illegal
enterprises-the numbers, boot-
leg whiskey-while they depend
on Adele to support them.
"The men want to control
their destiny, themselves. They
don't want to have to work for
the white man. So for years
they don't work. If they were to
work in what they termed a low,
demeaning position they would
die - spiritually die."
These are the feelings Young
wants her actors to convey. She
worked intensely with the cast
--all of whom were recruited
from outside of the speech de-
partment-developing the char-
acters beyond the pages and
talking about their daily exist-
ences.
"I want to present real live
human beings, not stereotyped
characters,' Young comments.

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