The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 44

THE VANCOUVER SUN, MONDAY, JAN. 19, 1987 Teen drama keeps kids up front Cleverly done, this impersonation of Mozart's clarinetist Vj X.J" i 4 StBf sew I 4 V- v' A 4i By SUSAN MERTENS Wesley Foster, the Vancouver Symphony orchestra's 39-year-old principal clarinetist, is not a flash VANCOUVER SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S CANADIAN PACIFIC MUSICALLY SPEAKING CONCERT Prokofiev Classical Symphony, Mozart Clarinet Concerto In A Major, Stravinsky Dumbarton Oaks, Strauss Der Rosenkavalier Suite. Clarinet soloist Wesley Foster, host 'Anton Stadler' and conductor Kazuyoshi Akiyama. Orpheum Theatre, Jan. 17 soloist.

He's a fluent and highly mu-sical player with a virile, well-rounded tone who listens to what's going on around him. And that ability to listen FOSTER of playing just a bit on top of the notes he played the simple, hymnlike slow movement with a sweet, affecting tenderness. The Mozart concerto, however, was just one element of a thoroughly delightful bit of programing that kept imaginative hold of the evening's classical theme. Best of the bunch was Dumbarton Oaks, Stravinsky's tribute to the old concerto grosso form, which, Kazuyoshi Akiyama made dance with all its angularity and rhythmic vitality freshly alive. His handling of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony combined wide open, transparent textures with a speedy beat and it was all-stops-out sound, lush and luxuriant, for Richard Strauss's waltz-rich suite from his classical-romantic crossover opera Der Rosenkavalier.

STEVE BOSCH to mesh the virtuoso writing in Mozart's Clarinet Concerto with the orchestral parts gave his performance all the attractive intimacy and integration of fine chamber playing. He's also not bad at impersonating Anton Stadler, the clarinet-playing friend of Mozart for whom the concerto was written. Emerging onstage in powdered wig, white stockings, breeches and lace cuffs, he offered an entertaining patter of anecdotes and musical information in a Viennese accent that earned him an intermission dialect critique from a trio of German speakers standing next to me. If his performance was not always quite as buoyant in the outer movements of the concerto as I'd have liked that bubbling feeling LEFT TO RIGHT: Pownall as Stalin, Hutt, Haworth and Harley: strong performances A strange dignity DEGRASSI JUNIOR HIGH. Sundays at 5 p.m.

on Ch. 2. By LEE BACCHUS Teenagers on television aren't people; they're devices. TV teens do two things: dish out wisecracks and stir up trouble for the TV mom and dad. This is so when a TV writer suffers TV writer's block, he can use a smart-alecky teen who shaves his head or smashes the station wagon to jumpstart his creativity.

The teenagers on Degrassi Junior High aren't entirely realistic either but they're about as close to genuine sub-adults as you could probably stand. In other words, they walk around looking uncomfortable in their skin, are fiercely overconfident and pathetically vulnerable all at the same time, and speak in clunky, one-syllable bursts that only Sly Stallone can understand. They are unformed, as they are in real life, twitching about in the pupa-stage of humanhood. And as ugly as that can be sometimes it's okay here because this new 13-part CBC series, a sequel to the award-winning Kids of Degrassi Street produced by Linda Schuyler and Kit Hood, isn't for crabby adults like you and me. It's about teenagers and it's FOR teenagers.

The show, too, is a bit unformed. Using an ensemble cast of more than 50 kids (many of them new to acting), Degrassi Junior High flits between scenes quickly and capriciously. One minute we eavesdrop on a conversation in the girls' washroom and the next watch as the school wiseass initiates a newcomer by locking him in a janitor's closet. Two things tie this all together: relentless P.A. announcements and a thin but pointed storyline.

All in all it's kind of like a Robert Altman film with zits. In Sunday's debut the pointy part of the story concerned the political ambitions of Stephanie (Nicole Stoffman), a physically precocious bimboette who runs for student president only to appease her vanity. Stephanie has sex appeal she trades kisses for votes but lacks ideals and vision. Fortunately, her best friend Voula (Niki Kemeny) is as bright as she is plain, and so she outlines Stephanie's campaign and writes her speeches for her. But later, when Stephanie's gratitude to Voula takes a backseat to boys, they have a falling out.

Stephanie wins the election but is left remorseful about the sacrifice, her tarted-up image and responsibilities she never really thought about before. Obviously, there's the hand of a big person behind all this "value-enhancement" or whatever they're calling it in educational sociology these days. But it's a hand that wears kid gloves and rarely gets in the way. Like in the pint-sized perspective of a Peanuts strip, parents are rarely seen or heard in Degrassi Junior High. Teachers, too, linger in the periphery.

Director's strength becomes weakness mus By LLOYD DYKK At the depth of their degradation, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev stand by the piano in an anteroom of the Kremlin while the two official bullies show them how to do it: how to write good music. Joseph Stalin and his cultural commissar Andrei Zhdanov sit on the piano bench picking out some slow heavy folk song that they require the other two to sing, and as they voice this plodding dirge, hands meekly behind their backs, Shostakovich and Prokofiev are far from the brilliant steeds they once were. They're draft horses forced to tow their own ignominy. We're in the middle of the infamous Central Committee Resolution of 1948 in which Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Russia's leading composers, would be denounced for writing "formalist" music. Literature, theatre, painting and film had been scrubbed up to doctrinal purity: now it was time for music.

David Pownall's play is an imagined meeting of the four signal men on one boozy evening boozy for Stalin and Zhdanov, that is, who browbeat the composers, trying to get the Party visions into their heads, and perhaps more something of a more personal nature. Their guests, though humiliated as though they were sitting for their piano examinations, as Prokofiev says maintain a strange quiet dignity, rarely raising their voices. But volumes of meaning fill that space, full of unanswerable questions on the subject of art. In bringing the conflict down to a personal level, Pownall succeeds in raising a lot of speculations that are both germane to the real situation and to a broader field of enquiry. Its failure is in prolonging itself long after its points have been made.

Also, it scarcely hints at the real horror that was caused Soviet artists. For this you would have to read Shostakovich's memoirs, Testimony, one of the saddest books ever MASTER CLASS. By David Pownall. Vancouver Playhouse production. At Vancouver Playhouse to Feb.

14, 8 p.m. written because it reveals how thorough the shame was for Shostakovich who came to loathe himself (and even Prokoviev). The portraits of Stalin liked to put a man face to face with his own death and then make him dance to his own and Zhdanov worked like an experienced torturer he set one composer against the reveal men quite different from the ones in the play who are considerably softened by humor. The production, directed by Walter Learning, is an admirable one, headed by Leon Pownall's Stalin, a skilful tyrant whose cajoling suddenly rears into a vocal explosion indicative of his intent. He registers the psychology of the hostile outsider, affronted by things he can't understand.

When Pownall picks out a simple melody on the piano looked at that icon and that melody came into my his face and casual tone suggest he has no doubt in himself a touch that has Prokofiev in the toilet puking from fear. William Hutt, in the underwritten part of Zhdanov, is equally skilled at this subtle sort of stratagem, and bis playing with Pownall has the plausible jokiness of heavies in on the game together. There are also strong performances from Graham Harley (a dead-ringer for Shoskakovich, right down to the cowlick) and especially Peter Haworth as the aged Prokofiev terribly touching and somehow inviolable, just through his bearing. All four are required to play the piano, and all do so well. The music is a strong element of the play's success: the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich never seemed more brilliant than those few silver shreds we hear, turning in the air.

By MARKE ANDREWS Australian writer-director Paul Cox makes exquisitely sensual films. His Man of Flowers exemplified how visuals and sound can frame a character's existence, showing the refined tastes and lonely life of a middle-aged man. Unfortunately, Cox's strength has become his weakness. Cactus, his sixth and latest movie, relies too much on sight and sound technique and not enough on substance. Once you get beneath the choral music, luscious panoramas, and amplified bird noises, you find that the only thing achoring the movie is Robert Menzies' performance.

Isabelle Huppert plays Colo, a French woman who, while visiting friends in Australia, loses the sight in one eye in a car crash. The doctor tells her she must have the damaged organ removed if she is to save the sight of her other eye. She refuses, without giving her reasons. Colo, whose marriage is disintegrating back in Paris, stays in Australia. Her host Tom (Norman Kaye, the star of Man of Flowers), introduces her to Robert (Menzies), a blind man who cares for a greenhouse full of cacti.

Colo teaches Robert how to love, and he shows her that being blind isn't the end of the world, although she nevertheless opts for the operation to save her eyesight. CACTUS. Starring Isabelle Huppert and Robert Menzies. At the Vancouver East Cinema. Mature.

Because of Cox's refusal to let us in on Colo's thoughts, Huppert never brings her character to life. Does she first refuse to surrender her eye out of vanity? Because she wants to punish herself? Does she know herself? Menzies, a stage actor in his first major film role, is excellent as a man who hides his feelings behind a surface of cynicism and wit. Like his cacti, he needs nurturing. And like the cacti, he buffers himself from the world with a thorny hide. Cox uses techniques that have become standard in his films lush music, long camera pans, the sounds of nature (most jarring of which is the Australian whip bird), and home-movie footage showing the characters at childhood.

These devices mostly just draw attention to themselves, but there is one exquisite moment. Robert tells Colo how he once fell as a child and could see for a few brief seconds; later, there is footage of a boy falling. His parents pick him up, and the look in his face is magical, an expression of sheer joy. That moment is electric, and nothing in the movie measures up to it. Ignition on, transmission engaged, now.

riz'1 I RICHMOND NORTH VANCOUVER North Vancouver Suzuki 1348 Marine Drive 985-0528 VANCOUVER Boundary Suzuki 1790 Boundary Road 298-4174 Richmond Imports Suzuki 3691 No. 3 Road 273-0331.