The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 12

ARTS GUARDIAN Wednesday November 14 1973 12 "3 'eft: in transit at Warsaw airport. Top centre: Norman Del Top right: sightseeing Warsaw, in the background the Palace. Left" waiting at Fucharest airport. Above: the New Philharmonia in rehearsal. Rignt: erc-r Pears.

New Philharmonia Orchestra returned to Festival Hall last night after touring Poland Rumania where contemporary English was given a cautious welcome although Tippett concert in Bucharest was a sellout. DEREK COOPER brought back this photo-report the thought and the flog that went into the 213,500 expedition. by) which makes me extremely unpopular in television and this is one of the reasons I do so much les than 1 used to Connell. -So a not-too-gruntled pair, combining to save us from a fate worse than death, if it is better to be dead than red. All perfectly permissible but not, one must realise, making for impartiality.

This report claimed disproportionate Communist influence irt the unions and I don't juppose anyone doubts that all oflr.e is up for grabs and Communists re. if thev will forgive the phrase, officer material. Dedicated, aggressive, and apparently impervious to boredom. There was a most true and funnv scene at a local AEU branch meeting. Half a doen members.

An unwearying Communist chairman. And an agenda of jaw-breaking boredom. And GROVES and the RLPO by Gerald Larner THE BENJAMIN BRITTEN birthday cele-brations have begun. The composer actually achieves the age of 60 a week on Thursday, but the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra has already made a splendid tribute. One of the most pleasing aspects of the birthday concert in the Philharmonic Hall last night was the care and taste with which the programme had been chosen.

The "Tragic" Symphony of Schubert, one of Britten's favourite led naturally into the Three Fragments from Berg's Wo-zeck," which has had a lasting influence on Britten's operas. The pair of them made a most effective contrast with Britten's own Spring Symphony after the interval. Sir Charles Groves conducted a too thickly populated and imperfectly balanced but well characterised performance of the Schubert and thrilling one of the Berg. The Wozzeck score sounded so well, in fact, so clear in spite of its dark complexity, and so emotionally powerful that the next step must be a com EXHIBITIONS in Bradford LANDING UP at the busy, ingenious, and vivacious New Lane Gallery (52 Godwin St.) after the blackened, broken-down, diffuse suburbs of Bradford is like finding an unexpected heart with a small pulse, maybe, but beating ferociously. Enter downstairs into a shop loaded with poetry pamphlets, hand-Mown glass, leather-work, pottery, and dazzling silver rings.

It's noisy too, from the jewellers beavering away, behind, at files and grindstones. Pass at least three heads crouched to magnifier, spot-lamp and upstairs, to a funny, lewd, and lovely show of paintings by Brian Holmes (until November 24). They combine irreverence with a lusty, healthy gusto. Debunk is to put it mildly. In "Judgement of far from the strained seriousness of Gil classic.

Paris leers wickedly from Tod Mar. Cultural The the and nmusic the of THE RED UNDER THE BED on television FALCO DANCE COMPANY at Sadler's Wells by Philip Hope-Wallace Nancy Banks-Smith where would officers lead the rank and file but into battle There were savage battle scenes of picket and police clashes As documentaries go it had a cast of thousands. To be precise 20 talking heads, too many for clarity. Though Wyatt said the ultra-Left were not keen on talking to TV quite enough were willing to talk to him often in the touching tones of old-fashioned faith. An evident way to reach the lost tribes of trade unionists, who no longer go to branch meetings is surely through television.

Which took them and can return them. for instance, have been to no branch meeting since I took up with television (which reminds one of Mrs Kinsey who remarked she'd seen very little of her husband smce he became interested in sex). Liverpool plete concert performance by the RLPO. Sir Charles must conduct, of course, and Jill Gomez must sing the part of Marie for, on the evidence of these splendid fragments, they are both fully in command of the style and in touch with the atmosphere. Miss Gome is so poised and radiant in her singing at present that she attracted most of the admiring attention in the Spring Symphony." Kenneth Bowen sang clearly and accurately but was a little weak in sound, and Barbara Robotham had the misfortune to find that much of the contralto part lies just too low to show her voice at its best.

There were balance problems here too, but it was a generally happy performance, in a mood to communicate the delightful freshness of the music. It is not Britten's strongest work for the concert hall. It is, on the other hand, an apt one for an occasion like this, particularly when there is a chorus as well prepared as the Philharmonic Choir was last night, unworried by the several problems the writing offers and always buoyant in rhythm. wailing organ ostinato. I thought the middle piece, "The Sleepers." the more typical.

Here Falco again uses speech like student charades, the two couples shift between simulated carnal congress of one kind or another (often hilariously undignified), pick-a-back, and crutch stretching of a kind never suggested by the BBC's early morning Eileen Fowler, the moves interspersed with remarks such as You wouldn't like me to do that to you Nuzzling bed-sharers rose and wrested, rather in the manner of that old music hall staple the Apache Dance but without the bang on the drum, or indeed any music but Hush-a bye Baby moaned now and again. Baby blue tights, and miles of plastic dross on the floor: such experiments may lead to higher things who knows? WAREm The Royal Taste SHERRY BOTTLED IN OUR ROYAL BODEGA IN SPAIN CREAM MEDIUM DRY MANZANILLA Recommended Retail Price 1,60 289293 Kcscnt Street, London, W.l. SPECIALISING as small companies mu-t. Auglia Television does drama to a degree and ducks to superfluity. Not just dueks of course.

Duck-! and geese and sejni-palmated plovers. Almost an thing with feathers or a leg at each corner. Like hobby-horses judging from "The Red Under the Bed," a rare Anglian plunge into politics. Woodrow who devised and appeared in it, ha's busied himself with Communism in the1 unions for at least 17 years, and may have found a twin soul in Brian Compel, programme adviser to Anglia. Botiji seem to feel that their careers have- suffered from their Right-wing convictions.

"It is understandable that Communists and ultra-Left-wingers should have done all they could to dowm me" Wyatt. "I'm considered to taike up a very extreme position. SHERIff The SHERRY BOTTLED IN OUR BOYAL BODEGA IN SPAIN CREAM -MEDIUM DRY MANZANILLA Recommended Retail PricLI0 J89283 Recent London, W.l. Last night's Caviar of 1970 had Ivncs and music by Robert Cole and a' group called Vertical Burn to accompany it. But the first piece on the programme, Tub choreographed by Jennifer Muller was still very much in the world of the arty ballet dating from someone like Roland Petit.

There was a huge bathroom, with drugget on the floor as big as a tennis court and far left a bath, with real water in it, in which at first some rather naturally damp girls laved their persons, wetting their hair and shaking it like Welsh sheepdog bitches, causing their drapes to cling to them like funeral cerements. Thus they struck poses, later to be copied by gents who invaded the bathroom six not really verv sexy souls posing or scrambling on "the bathroom floor. The noise of running water alternated with a at the Festival Hall used to a different approach. The strings, in brisk and quite fiery mood, favoured Brendel's reading and, after some shaky ensemble in the second movement, the overall effect only improved. Brendel's ability to shape a Jong phrase was always evident a sense of urgency improved the grazioso of the last movement and, when he suddenly promoted one dancing flurry of notes from piano to forte, it seemed all part of the very good humour he was by now in.

Brahms was followed by another big work with an especially weighty opening, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. Maazel's dramatic sense here, allied with scrupulous tempi, did nothing to weaken the view that the first movement is the composer's finest achievement. The playing was lively without being flawless and in the symphony's faster music the merest hint of coarseness can summon up visions of demented peasants cavorting in a cloud of vodka. But the last movement, longing in its andante and then daring all in its allegro, was worthy of anything that had gone before. greens, not subdued charcoal.

The same inference of colour applies to the leather gloves and trilby hat, both creased and dented with wear and age. But the "Highgate" sculptures are uncompromisingly black and solid chunky pillars and blocks hugged together or sturdy arches splayed between plinths contain contradiction in their union of death with form. Alongside. Judith Shackleton's paintings fade somewhat indecisively. The paint is scraped very thinly, mechanically, into predominantly geometrical compositions.

The approach is confused, at times aiming at pure design such as the bolder stripes and lines of "Deck at others more successfully at atmosphere. The empty grey, sky and sand of "Illinois" or the dewy fragility of convey sensation, if paucely. LOUIS FALCO and his Dance Company are at Sadlers Wells, this week and next, with a varied repertory. Last night they were welcomed as perfectly serious and dedicated artists by a large audience which seemed often uncritically to show that it too could swallow almost anything in the sacred name of break-through." Mr Falco himself, an all-American faun with a fuzz of hair and lithe and free movements quite recently made a stir with a ballet for the Rambert company called tutti frutti which was like an idealised gang bang (not so idealised now one comes to remember it) in which the dancers pushed each other roughly about, slapped each other, traded insults and pant-ings. One end of Mr Falco's creative spectrum seems based on the rock musical MAAZEL and the NPO by Christopher Ford ALFRED BRENDEL certainly isn't classified as a Brahms man quite an occasion then, when a pianist of such formidable musical intellect confronts what is probably the most physically and mentally demanding of all the great concertos, the Brahms No.

2 in flat. Brendel has fact played it before and indeed has recorded it (early this year with Schmidt-Isserstedt. a few days before the conductor died), but is it yet his sort of music He played it this time pretty straight, and with quite unusual clarity, preferring not to linger and lunge as many do in the first movement's solo passages, and thus emphasising the scope of the music by structural balance. The gain in stature sometimes meant a loss in romantic appeal, and indeed Lonn Maazel, conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra, took a somewhat more overtly dramatic view to judge from appearances. If there was occasionally a hint of the prosaic, if Brahms sometimes admirable rather than lovable, it was perhaps only because we are black, and yellow on solid blue.

The colours trying to sing out in the narrow corridor faced by severe, rectangular windows. And "Black and White Figure" had a tongue-melting, toffee combination of creamy white and paling bitumen. But Barry Ward's discs, however carefully worked in wood or chipboard or polystyrene merely focus sterility. Down at the Park Square Gallery in Leeds (until November 30) Philippa Beale is showing sculpture, for the most part based on Highgate Cemetery. This sounds morbid and there is a strange, grey feel about all the work, as of ghosts from the past.

But the insubstantial greyness is fused with a very warm solidity. Rounded, dented apples are piled into "Windfalls" with such wholesomeness they could be glowing red, yellow, and and Leeds by Merete Bates hand on naked thigh of simpering prizewinner while buxom competitors blush brick-red or blue with anger and envy. Then "Just Good Friends" shows a couple hand in hud, she oozing satisfaction while he is split with perplexity and red passion. Holmes has a style that is fast developing an uninhibited colour and slashing, spiky, if at times cartoon draughtsmanship which add a spunky panache To pass from the New Lane Gallery to the inner sanctum of the Senior Common Room. Leeds University, is not unlike leaving a factory floor for a Hospital ward.

Certainly the tasteful decoration and atmosphere of sedate inhibition do little to assist George Hainsworth's spontaneous, daubed characters on superimposed coloured grounds (until 26). There's a "Flamboyant to red, green,.