Daily News from New York, New York • 65

The endurance k4 of Pettersson By BILL ZAKARIASEN OMEWHERE in Soedermalm, the working-class district of Stockholm, is a simple home with a bed. In that bed lives (or shall we say exists) a Chop Opry prices The producers of "Broadway Opry 19" have cut ticket prices for the country music series nearly 40 because of poor attendance. The new prices, which go into effect with Tuesday night's show headlined by Conway Twitty, drop the top-price tickets from $19 to $12, and eliminate the traditional higher rates, for weekend performances. i "We listened a little too much to Broadway and the prices were too high," said producer David Fitzpatrick. "We're going to bite the bullet a little bit here, since we want to be around for a few years." Fitzpatrick said he believes that resistance to the price structure was responsible for the many empty seats at the St James Theater during the first week of "Opry," scheduled run through mid-September.

But he' added that the high-brow atmosphere of the theater district itself may be keeping some country fans away, and the lower prices will convince them that "you can come to Broadway in jeans." Tomorrow's scheduled show with Buck Owens has been canceled, and the theater will be dark through the weekend. Fitzpatrick said he is trying to reschedule Owens for Aug. 17-19. Bruce Smith N' ft I'll HHlliiii ft ahulaMWiS MMMMMI We're Movin Right Along 1bbur Favorite Theatres! Swedish composer Allan Pettersson some people confuse pity with compassion? At any rate, this tetralogy is an ever-increasing and all-enveloping series of magnificently organized symphonic images which, as exemplified by the near 90-minute one-movement Ninth, becomes an almost unbearable yet heartbreakingly true musical clarification of the times in which we live. America-based Sergiu Comissiona and Antal Dorati (who spent many years working in Sweden) are, oddly, the only conductors of any real clout who as yet perform Pettersson's music in public or for the phonograph record.

Thanks largely to them, we can obtain (at least in certain New York stores) Symphonies 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 on such labels as EMI, London, CBS, Philips, and the more arcane Discofil, Caprice and Polar. gnarled 68-year-old man who is without doubt the greatest living composer of symphonies. He is Allan Pettersson, a name virtually unknown by reputation or even sound outside his native Sweden. Many music critics consider the art of writing in symphonic form a dead, or at least an out-of-date issue. After all, didn't Mahler, Sibelius and finally Shostakovich say the last on the subject, and didn't Shostakovich eventually camflouage song cycles and tone poems under the name "symphony" anyway? The symphony as a form meaning the presentation of salient musical ideas, the orderly development and final resolution of them is decidedly alive (if physically unwell) in this one Swedish composer, who has often said: "I am a voice crying in the wilderness, a voice that is threatened to be drowned in the noise of its Pettersson was born in 1911 into a large, poor family his first memory is of a one-room slum basement apartment whose one window was covered with bars.

He has wanted to escape ever since. At 10, he bought a Cheap violin with moneyearned from selling Christmas cards, but later he gave up the instrument after a tiff with a conductor, and began devoting his life to composition. Still dirt poor, he managed to win a Jennyg. Lind Scholarship and went to Paris to study with Rene Leibowitz. 1 His talent developed slowly, but by the late 1940s and early '50s, with his deceptively lyrical "Barefoot Songs," his startlingly agonized violin duets and rough-hewn first four symphonies, he showed to the few who would listen that here was an angry young man with worthwhile things to say.

His works were called proletarian, but he scorned the adjective, since he was above all an independent person devoted to the solitary human spirit struggling against collective opinion. "My commitment to my work is not political," he insisted. "The whole history of mankind is about man's cruelty to man as it was in the beginning, one individual was confronted by another, and the weaker was struck down." Pettersson was himself struck down. In 1963 his chronic bone ailments were diagnosed as hopeless rheumatoid arthritis. He has spent most of his waking and unwaking hours in bed, waiting for the next drug that could ease his indescribable pain.

Yet far from destroying Pettersson's creative spark, his illness seemed to encourage it A tetralogy of symphonies Numbers Six through Nine, each intere-lated in thematic and subject matter followed, each more powerful and emotionally draining than its predecessor. To say that these symphonies recall Mahler with a Scandinavian accent is apt, but that accent injects into the Mahlerian-Viennese paranoia a sense of incredible, indefinable space and eventual serenity that seem indeed the property of the terminally ill. An English critic once dubbed the Pettersson Seventh "rampant self-pity." A more reputable New York critic spoke of Mahler the same way once, but isn't it possible IT'S HOWL-ARITY as crafty Cruella DeVil chases every eat your heart out' i 1 i i spotted canine in town! SIR LEW GRADE and MARTIN STARGER present A JIM HENSON PRODUCTION "THE MUPPET MOVIE" Executive Producer MARTIN STARGER Produced by JIM HENSON Written by JERRY JUHL JACK BURNS Directed by JAMES FRAWLEY Music Lyrics by PAUL WILLIAMS and KENNY ASCHER Co- produced by DAVID LAZER Starring The Muppet Performers JIM HENSON FRANK OZ JERRY NELSON RICHARD HUNT-DAVE GOELZ Co-starrinq CHARLES DURNING and AUSTIN PENDLETON Special Guest Stars EDGAR BERGEN MILTON BERLE MEL BROOKS JAMES COBURN DOM DeLUlSE ELLIOTT GOULD BOB HOPE MADELINE KAHN CAROL KANE CLORIS LEACHMAN STEVE MARTIN RICHARD PRYOR -TELLY SAUMAS ORSON WELLES PMJL WILLIAMS SowndbacfcMibMtaaAjiMicffecsitswidfeiM Rd The BaMmi Muppet Mavw Book I IF II l- GFNFRll AuTMFNTB; to-rHM5d by BUENA VI5TA DISTRIBUTION CO INC one CIRCUS 8 my at 9ih St. 489 9290 EAST WSXLO 59th ST SWi Sl ot 3rd Ow 1717 In 7QMM ana 1X11 mm STtna SinJiack Stereo J. nmw Dtirwy hw)fuv tmmtunttm Techoieolor Un by Butu vis I distbiwjTion CO.

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