The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 68

F-4Entertainment TIIF. CINC INNATI ENQUIRER Sunday, December 6. 1987 Pops' 'Sound of Music' to fill Music Hall 33B T'tx which von Trapp sings "I love you" to Maria; an organ introduction Rodgers wrote for the wedding scene. "I personally, for the last four months, have edited all the orchestral parts myself," says Kunzel, who plans to conduct the sessions using a facsimile of Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestration. wui i -if I HANSEL AM) CKETIX Performed by ECCO! Ensemble Company of Cincinnati Opera College of Mount St.

Joseph College Theatre December I 3, 3 p.m. For more Information, Cull 2 1 1- 1373 Barber and Sandra Graham as Elsa. Separate casts were necessary because Ilagegard and Daniels had other commitments on the concert nights, and because Farrell does not perform in public any more. The compact disc will include music cut from previous productions and is set for release in late May, Kunzel says. Kunzel says the project is a response to a recent spate of musical albums using big-name opera stars.

"I was tremendously perturbed to see how major (record) companies have picked their musical casts," Kunzel says, citing such albums as Deutsche Grammo-phon's 1985 West Side Story and London Records' recent release of My Fair Lady. "Everything is so miscast, they're ridiculous. I can't understand why on earth (Leonard) Bernstein allowed Deutsche Gram-mophon to cast West Side Story that way." Composer Bernstein conducted the album with soprano Kiri Te Kanawa as Maria and tenor Jose Carreras as Tony, and critics complained that the singers' vocal styles and accents ill-suited their roles. "I decided, when we do (The Sound of Music), we're going to do it right," Kunzel says. "This one is a classic.

It's not the razzmatazz of (Rodgers and Hammerstein's) Oklahoma! or Carousel, but it has tremendous beauty and dignity." Kunzel calls von Stade, whose TV special Christmas with Flicka (her nickname) airs on PBS stations this month, "the world's greatest lyric mezzo There couldn't be a finer Maria." Her show airs at 9 p.m. Dec. 18 and 9 a.m. Dec. 24 on Channel 48.

The conductor scored a coup by recruiting legendary operapop singer Farrell out of retirement for the album, and called on the Metropolitan Opera's Daniels, a Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music graduate, for the role of the upper-crust Elsa. Swedish-born Hagegard, says Kunzel, is "dashing, young, a wonderful character actor (with) a little bit of an accent We're going back now to the Continental touch in this role." Kunzel says the Pops disc will be the first truly complete recording of the Sound of Music score, including forgotten passages he discovered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Among those passages: a section of "nature music" after the first abbey scene; an extra verse in the song "An Ordinary Couple," in BY RAY COOKLIS The Cincinnati Knquirer Tlie nation's record bins will be ilive with The Sound of Music in a few months, thanks to the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. The Pops is set to record the classic 1959 Rodders and Ham-nierstein musical with an operatic cast featuring mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade as Maria, baritone Hakan Ilagegard as Captain von Trapp, soprano Eileen Farrell as the Abbess and soprano Barbara Daniels as Elsa Schrader. "This is a landmark decision for us," Pops conductor Erich Kunzel says.

"1 think it's going to open the doors for us into a new market. No symphony orchestra in the U.S. or, for that matter, the world records musicals as such. It's usually done by pick-up orchestras." Recording sessions with the Pops' Cleveland-based label, Te-larc Records, are scheduled for Dec. 13-14 in Cincinnati's Music Hall.

The Cincinnati May Festival Chorus also will participate. The recording sessions will follow Friday and Saturday's concert performances of The Sound of Music in Music Hall. For the performances, von Stade will be joined by Richard Zeller as von Trapp, Janet Stubbs as the Abbess and Kimberly Sample Cincinnati's One Truly Personal Hotel $140 Luxury for $79 (Including all taxes) Any weekend during November and December check into The Cincinnatian and check out Cincinnati most elegant hotel: Valet parking; ma.d service; many rooms with private balconies overlooking the hotel dramatic 8-story atrium; remote-controlled television sets; oversize bathrooms with phones, hair dryers, Roman-size tubs, terry robes and separate dressing areas. Come downtown to sample the sweet life. And, don't wait for some special intn a momnnh nrrasinn.

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321-3733 i ill EASTGATE SPRINGDALEt mfRyWIGER aissaia'rsH SSSSr conimuowmh coE2ZXi" IATI SHOWS FBI SH LATE SHOWS HO 1 1 BARGAIN MATINEE $2.75 FIRST AFTERNOON SHOW ONLY VISIT OUR ART GALLERYIPRINTS MAKE PERFECT PRESENTSGIFT CERTIFICATES AVAILABLE wrench truth out of black American life in language that used "some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life." Baldwin's ability to describe the world he saw was awesome. Not only could he write in self-mocking tones about the psychological confusion that bedeviled him as a black American but he could also honestly confront his homosexuality. 4 -rs mmmmmm Enjoy the romance of authentic rivcrboat dining Roger Ebert on "THREE MEN AND A "I DON'T KNOW WHEN I LAUGHED HAD TEARS ROLLING DOWN MY CHEEKS." "TWO THUMBS UP!" Siskel Ebert it Sunday's BY JUAN WILLIAMS The Washington Post Apart from his celebrity, apart from his fabled youth as a Harlem preacher, apart from his open homosexuality and his decision to leave the United States apart from all of that James Baldwin was a great American writer. He wrote beautifully, with passion and compassion, about the brass tacks of American life: race, sex, religion and violence. Long before his death last week, Baldwin's writings became a standard of literary realism.

His essays on America evoked place, time and emotions so successfully that they rival the carefully carved worlds of novelists. His accuracy was the key: In his works, the reader could resonate to the sounds of the street corner, as drawn by Baldwin, could feel the anger of black Americans so long denied a role in American life as Baldwin wrote about that anger. Black people reading Baldwin knew he wrote the truth. White people reading Baldwin sensed his truth about the lives of black people and the sins of a racist nation. Baldwin achieved his status principally as an essayist.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is more remarkable for its autobiographical glimpses of Baldwin's youth and black New York society than it is as fiction. After that, however, his fictional works paled next to the reality of his essays, particularly Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), books that stunned their readers when they appeared. The world as he saw it Baldwin often referred to himself as a "witness," and his essays witnessed the lives and ways of the people around him, black and white, rich and poor. His insights did not stick out; they were part of the fabric of the vivid life he painted with words. He resisted Best" Brunch From 11:00 AM to 2:30 PiM A brunch buffet like no other.

Adults Children $5P Seniors 6P (60 and older) Call for reservations. Fell out of fashion But honesty was not always in fashion. In the late 1960s, he was criticized by some activists because he did not fall in line with every variety of militant rhetoric. Some black writers did not appreciate his insistence on truth when it did not fit their drive to create a "Black Is Beautiful" esthetic. Julius Lester, a professor and novelist, in a 1984 interview with Baldwin, said he knew of no contemporary black writers who had Baldwin's interest in being a witness to the world.

"What are you a witness to?" Lester asked. "Witness to whence I came, where I am," Baldwin replied. "Witness to what I've seen and the possibilities that I think I see Now in order for me to execute my responsibility, I may have to offend them all (whites and blacks, young and old), but that also comes with the territory. I don't see how I can repudiate it Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.

In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth." The success of Baldwin's effort as the witness is evidenced by the people, black and white, gay and straight, famous and anonymous, whose humanity he unveiled in his writings. The proof of shared humanity across the divides of race, class and more is the testament that the preacher's son, James Baldwin, has left us. James Baldwin wrote about life as he saw it the corruption of being a cheerleader or a critic for his family, his country, for black people or white people. He never abided by the conventionality of citing expert or statistical evidence. We were invited in to see the world with James Baldwin.

This sense of admiration for the the truth, for the world as it is, is what attracted him to writing. His literary heroes, he once said, were novelists Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. At the start of his career it was Wright to whom he went for advice. And he idolized Wright and Ellison because they told the truth about the life of black America, unlike some black writers who wrote, he said, about a world that "had nothing to do with me "Richard (Wright) was very different, though," Baldwin said in a 1984 interview. "The life he described was the life I lived.

I recognized the tenements. I knew the rat in Native Son. I knew that woman in the story Bright and Morning Star. All of that was urgent for me." He found the same urgency in Ellison's Invisible Man. He credited Ellison with the ability to located at llie foot of on the ovinnton.

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