The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 214

MozgrtCpncert Modern Dance Championed 'The Self-Contained Solo J)y Jack Anderson CLARINETIST Richard Stoltzman will play a Mozart Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony this week, part of its Mostly Mozart series. Alexander Schneider will conduct the programs, which open at 8 p.m., Wednesday, in Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium. The program also offers Mozart's Symphony No. 14, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Haydn's Symphony No.

94, the New York THE solo may very well be the most daring of dance forms. Dancers who perform solos must stand alone before an audience and in some way persuade, entertain or amaze that audience. They have no one else to help them: Only they can do it. Solos are ous; they're gambles. Since most soloists dance their own choreography, the soloist must be equally persuasive as a creative and as an interpretative artist.

Even when soloists commission works from other choreographers, that too, can be perilous, for the soloists are, in effect, showing the world what someone else has thought of them, what someone else has made of them. Considering the risks involved in solos, it is not surprising that bad solos can seem monotonous or self-indulgent. A fine solo, however, can be a direct, even startling, communication from soul to soul. Solos are usually associated with modern dancers. Ballet, which so often concerns itself with pattern, is almost entirely -an artistic realm of group dances.

Yet ballet choreogra- A 'High Risk' King Lear Opera In a second kind of solo, music may serve not as a stimulus, but simply as an accompaniment Or there may be no music at all. In such dances, the emphasis is entirely upon movement quality or movement invention. Often, these dances are displays of dexterity. Thus in "Accumulation" Trisha Brown kept repeating a sequence of gestures; but with each repetition she added new gestures to complicate the sequence further. Murray Louis in "Deja Vu" treated the parts of his body as isolated entities that could move on their own, seemingly disconnected from the rest of his body.

Beth Soli's "Clearfield II" abounded in sudden changes from one movement quality to another. So did Dana Reitz's "Journey for Two Sides." In this work, Miss Reitz even gave the illusion of being two different dancers. When she danced on one platform, she was restrained and businesslike. But as soon as she stepped onto an adjacent platform, her movements grew extravagant Merce Cunningham has choreographed a solo called "Solo" in which he patters about like a small shy animal. Here, movement quality brings to mind something in nature.

Should one choreographically accentuate characterization or mood still further, then one will have created a third form of solo, the emotional or dramatic solo. Often, however, the solo's dramatic situation may be only hinted at. These implicitly dramatic solos can be genuinely mysterious. We who- watch them may not always understand them intellectually. Yet a dancer's personal conviction, imagination and stage presence can make us sure that we are witnessing emotional revelations.

Frequently, such dances present extreme states of feeling. In Remy Charlip's "Meditation," a soberly dressed man appeared to crack up and gradually fall apart ironically enough, to the sugary strains of Massenet. Just as soon as one devises a tidy set of categories into which solos can be made to fit, one may recall a solo that doesn't quite fit into any category. How, for example, can one categorize Senta Driver's "Memorandum?" In this choreographic: thingamajig, all Miss Driver did was trudge in a circle while reciting the names of famous ballerinas. It was an exasperating solo.

It was also totally absorbing to watch. One never quite knows what to -expect from Solos. Solos can indeed be special. AW York Timet present elaborate dramatic conflicts and to create intricate designs. Yet in the past decade or so, there has been a resurgence of solo dancing.

This, in turn, coincides with a revival of interest in the sources of modern dance. Even choreographers who like to work on a large scale have sometimes turned to solos. Meredith Monk's panoramic "Education of the Girlchild," for instance, was first conceived as a solo and that original solo is now part of the second half of hat gradually evolved into a group composition. Quite a few solos have been presented in New York in recent seasons. Thinking about some of them, it would seem that there are at least three major types of solos.

First, there are solos that are responses to music. Most of Miss Duncan's solos were of this kind. She took music that she admired and tried to make her dancing reflect its mood and Murray Louis treated the parts of his body as isolated entities that could move on their own structure. As a more recent example of the musically inspired solo, one could cite "32 Variations in Minor," the dance to Beethoven that the late James Waring choreographed for Ze'eva Cohen. The way Miss Cohen's arms, feet and fingers Jutted into space paralleled the tensions of the score, Waring having created a muscular drama to match the drama of the music.

But sometimes the relationship between music and dance Is not so direct. At two concerts this summer, dancing to music seemed a form of daydreaming. Just as one's thoughts can wander as one listens to music, so choreographers let bodies wander to music. William Dun-as's "Night Dances," to Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, consisted of mild semiballetic solos, dances that were quiet musings to music musings with the limbs, rather than with the mind. In contrast, Toby Armour's program of solos choreographed by herself and Aileen Passloff to Bartok, Beethoven, Brahms and Richard Busch, was much more grotesque: these were Impish Continued front Page 44 one level, and cannot restore or give in a different way what has been removed.

Henneberg's libretto is actually the best piece of work about the opera. For reasons which should be obvious, when Shakespeare is prepared for opera, compression, cuts, simplification, even reordering of scenes are inevitable. In his remarkable monograph, "Shakespeare and Opera," Win-ton Dean has pointed this out in many of the 180 operas based on Shakespeare's plays (34 of them). Few have tried the impossible task of actually setting a Shakespeare play operat-lcally. The goal is properly an opera on qr about a particular Shakespeare Play- This was conclusively achieved by two which are far and away the best, Verdi's "Otello" and "Fal-staff." Verdi came close to realizing his lifelong dream of composing a "King Lear" opera.

Indeed a complete libretto was prepared by Antonio Somma, to whom Verdi wrote: "It is frightening to have to reduce such a vast canvas to narrow dimensions, retaining originality and grandeur of the drama." Shakespeare for opera worried him also because of the "necessity of changing scenes all the time." Henneberg solved this problem very well, reducing the five acts and their 26 scenes to two parts or acts of four and seven scenes respectively, telescoping his Act II, scenes 2, 3, and 4 by having them on the stage simultaneously and played in alterna tion. The libretto also meets other important criteria. The translation does not attempt to convey Shakespeare's literary style though the compression retains crucial signal lines, recognizable even in German. Henneberg's opera play has terrific pace and dramatic viability, if only Reimann's music hadn't dragged it down. To be sure, the kind of vocal writing Reimann assigns to the principal characters helps distinguish them.

For the record, there are magnificent performances: Fischer-Dieskau, a towering, magnificent Lear, Helga Der-nesch and Colette Lorand as Goneril and Regan, violently evil, Julia Varady, beautiful in voice as Cordelia must be, Werner Goetz, as Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son, David Knutson, tenor, as Edgar, and countertenor as the mad Tom Edgar. The others were of comparable stature. These singers had to carry almost the entire burden of the characterization for the accompaniment did nothing to deepen or develop characters. They, the relationships and the tension levels are set musically at the outset, and the drama screams all the way. I suspect that recommendations and one-sided reports were important in piquing Ad-ler's interest, perhaps before the recording was available to him.

Any who are influential in the Opera's decision-making process may now hear for themselves. The "King Lear" recording puts all the evidence out there for judgment. pners nave created soios: in 1959, for example, George Bal-. anchine, ballet's great neoclass-icist, choreographed a solo for Paul Taylor, the modern dan-, cer, and in 1966 he choreographed Stravinsky's "Elegie" as a solo for Suzanne Farrell. And, of course, many beloved 19th-century ballets contain brilliant solo variations.

But it is modern dance that has really championed the solo as a self-contained entity. This is only to be expected, perhaps, for modern dancers have often regarded their art as personal expression, as a way of externalizing and giving shape to individual experience. Virtually all the modern t) dance pioneers were famous for solos. It was with her solos that Isadora Duncan astonished the world. Many of Martha Graham's early works were solos.

Ruth St. Denis, on occasion, choreographed pageantlike spectacles with large casts, but she was equally noted for her solo sketches on Oriental themes. Similarly, in Germany, although Mary Wigman did choreograph for groups, she also startled audiences with the intensity of her solos. The solo never ceased to be popular in modern dance. But as modern dance developed, choreographers increasingly devoted themselves to group works, and most choreographers still favor the group.

Groups, after all, enable one to i' vv.