The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 109

rmonie Season The in-town schedule follows: February 25 7:30 Music Hall Repeating February 24 program March 10 8 Music Hall Hans Schwieger conductor Gina Bachauer piano soloist March 11 7:30 Music Hall Repeating March 10 program March 12 1 Plaza theater Repeating March 10 program March 24 8 ra Music Hall Brian Priestman guest conductor March 25 7:30 Music Hall Repeating March 24 program April 21 8 Music Hall Odon Alonso guest conductor April 22 7:30 Music Hall Repeating April 21 program April 23 1 Plaza theater Repeating April 21 program May 5 8 Music Hall Hans Schwieger conductor May 6 7:30 Music Hall Repeating May 3 The Kansas City Philharmonic will open its curtailed 1969-70 season in January It will be a season of 20 weeks is as January 6 8 Music Hall Edouard van Remoortel guest conductor Yehudi Menuhin violin soloist January 7 7:30 Music Hall Repeating January 6 program January 8 1 Plaza theater Repeating January 6 program January 27 8 Music Hall Kurt Woess guest conductor January 28 7:30 Music Hall Repeating January 27 program January 26 1 Plaza theater Repeating January 27 program February 10 8 Music Hall Hans Schwieger conductor Zino Francescatti violin soloist February 11 7:30 Music Hall Repeating February 10 program February 24 8 Music Hall Hans Schwieger SYMBOL OF Harry Browne the attorney who negotiated a 2-year contract between the Philharmonic association and the musicians of the orchestra beams over the plaque presented him in the Musicians Union hall last Monday night when the contract was signed The inscription reads: HARRY BROWNE Associate Conductor-Labor Negotiations Kansas City Philharmonic 1969 Past and Personal in Painting By George McKenna The exhibition Pursuit of at the Nelson Gallery through December 14 provides the opportunity for a rare insight into the seemingly esoteric field of 17th-century Chinese painting Tni collection of some 32 single works or related groups of leaves from albums was as sembled only within the past 15 years by Mr and Mrs Earl Morse of New York with the guidance of Professor Wen Fong of Princeton university It is one of the few privately owned collections of Chinese paintings in America and is unique in that it concentrates on the career of a single artist Wang Hui (1632-1717) Not only are there scrolls by Wang Hui but examples by his predecessors teachers contemporaries and successors One can best approach the exhibition by bearing in mind the reverence of the Chinese for tradition the respect for their forebears and for modes of painting that have devel- THREE PRINCIPALS in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are playing at 8:30 Saturday night at the Music Hall are (left to right) Robert Burr as the Chief Player Clebert Ford as Guildenstern and John Church as Rosencrantz The hit tragicomedy focusing on the two least significant characters of will be offered by a touring company under sponsorship of William Jewel college Incisive Film Satirizes Hipness Suburban-Style A rts Entertainment Section THE KANSAS CITY STAR Sunday December 7 1969 Editorial Pages the Arts oped and survived for centuries MANY CHINESE artists like Wang Hui himself began by so closely imitating the styles of earlier painters that Westerners might consider such scrolls forgeries or copies But the later painters so absorbed the spirit of the ancient prototypes that they could create truly original pictures within that spirit and make personal statements in a bygone language Such a practice is similar to the use by modern poets of allusions to the classics or to Shakespeare that are readily understood by educated readers A visual parallel in the Western world is afforded by Picasso who explored the whole of art history and recast it in images that are now instantly identifiable as his own To the Chinese then the work of the traditional or orthodox painter is rich with layers and implications of meaning and it can become so for us In the mainstream of Chinese painting Wang pictures were of course immediately comprehensible to his 17th-century viewers His friends and fellow-artists joyfully added inscriptions and poems to the paintings extolling the greatness commenting on the poetic qualities of his vision and referring to historical precedents These commentaries are fully translated in the very complete catalogue of the exhibition But purely as examples of calligraphy or writing they have in themselves an appeal and linear flair we can enjoy in visual terms alone MOST OF US are not experts in Chinese painting but even the most cursory observer among us can readily discern through looking at the scrolls by such earlier painters as Shen Chou Wen Cheng-ming and Tung some of the more apparent of Wang sources of inspiration Thus prepared the viewer can examine such a tour-de-force as a set of 12 album leaves by Wgng Hui titled Pursuit of and detect the varying styles of the 12 different artists upon which the pictures are based These are not sedulous imitations but improvisations on a dozen themes Landscapes were the vehicle for Wang Hoi's orchestrations as they were the chief subject of Chinese painting Scenes of natural and man-made envi-(Continued on Following Page) the year 1638 A young Puritan divine dk in Boston leaving an estate valued at approximately 1500 British and a personal library of 260 volumes Half his funds he bequeaths to the new or which the General Court of Massachusetts has recently established in nearby Cambridge To this legacy John Harvard adds all his books In return the court elects to call the as-yet unnamed institution after its first private benefactor the year 1969 The still-relatively youthful University of Missouri-Kansas City opens a new library on its campus The building alone cost some 3 million dollars in public funds A fourth floor is to be completed at the expense of a private foundation (A fifth can be superimposed) The Structure currently houses about 310000 volumes When all its space is utilized however the new facility at will be able to accommodate more than three times as much material one small indication of the rate at Much higher education enterprise has grown in the last 331 years But the basic principle in- SE A TOAST TO THEMSELVES is offered by (left to right) Natalie Wood Dyan Cannon Elliott Gould and Robert Culp the title foursome of Carol Ted The film was written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker directed by Mazursky and produced by Frankovich for Columbia Pictures release Carol Ted fc reviewed below opens December 25 at the Towns By Giles Fowler (Th Star's Motion Pictura Editor) Carol Ted 'is funny uneven trenchant compromising And like it or not (I did very much with reservations) got to admit it throws penetrating light on some conspicuous nin-compooperies on the American scene Centered under its glare are the dedicatedly hip bourgeoisie suburbanites in their 30s piously puffing pot and embracing Eastern thought The film examines their marital mores their sexual hangups their fads and their private and party manners with a fine eye for preposterous detail Carol also assaults this irritating new cult of total love-communication (an aberration of Southern California where the film is set) which holds that to bare soul to friends strangers is the highest form of spiritual calisthenics not knocking candor but what a flat world it would be without the civilized niceties of diplomacy innuendo subtlety and restraint) Now these are all deserving targets and I congratulate Paul Mazursky as director and as co-author with Larry Tucker for lining up and ridiculing such a procession of follies Also praiseworthy are actors Elliott Gould Dyan Cannon and Robert Culp who perform circles around the fourth star Natalie Wood in this tale of two Los Angeles married couples caught up in the heady atmosphere of the Now Culture Most American filmmakers of courseware still a bit uneasy with total satire and does fail to deliver some final devastating stroke against its subjects The last moment on screen is a kind of cop-out Having shown that the sexually title couples are just ordinary uptight folks like you and me (a damning revelation from their standpoint) the film then resorts to a concluding sentimentalism that lets the foursome off the satiric hot It is the sort of ending you recall from those Doris Day slickies of a few years back It announces that All Right Now when the whole film up to then has been dedicated to hilariously all wrong MOST DELIGHTFULLY wrong is the sheer determination by which Bob Carol Ted and Alice undertake to embrace the With-It values that will make them forever young and unfettered If to do so came naturally they have to work so hard at it Bob and Carol (Culp and Miss Wood) who live in a His-p villa have already taken the first tentative steps toward an acceptably middle-class hipness love beads modified East Village tailoring you know the land of things They jects for memorial gifts Those responsible for the welfare of our local university let that fact be known and hunted for a donor They were unable to find one either in their own ranks or outside Meantime what books and other related offerings they and the stock of these was woefully grew more and more inconveniently located for students and faculty alike HAPPILY TODAY this is water over the dam except that the holdings while satisfactory in some areas are still much too spotty and more acquisition funds are urgently needed In any event the once-dispersed collections can be brought together at last under conditions that will permit maximum service The handsome new library at Fiftyfirst and Rock hill road simply designed for greater efficiency as an adjunct to study and research It should also furnish a vastly more congenial environment for those book uses that although not directly associated with course reading-lists or investigatory projects are so indispensable for the lifetime objectives of higher education A good deal of what was publicly stated in connection with the opening ceremonies I suppose may have sounded like more or less well-disguised platitudes But facts are facts Those realities that have to do with the immense contribution performed by an academic library have been familiar for a very long time indeed And not much more to be said on this subject Nevertheless as the frustrating experience of the trustees would seem to indicate the truth about academic libraries be reiterated too often if American colleges and universities whether private or tax-supported are to realize their full potential Today the university named for John Harvard has become the most munificently endowed private institution of its kind in the world See how the precedent set by his initial legacy has caught on over the last three and a third centuries But note also what has happened to those few shelves of books he left perhaDs as an after-thought At a recent count library holdings came to more than 7 Ms million volumes to say nothing of its vast accumulation of periodical files documents and the like So while by comparison the similar resources of may look almost infi-nitessimal as yet remember that already enormously enhanced in certain vital fields as a result of the close proximity of Linda Hall that the supplementary possessions of the Truman and other regional libraries far away and that the friends in the community seem increasingly ready to reinforce any state-provided purchase funds AH of which makes the new library only the more welcome For now at last our burgeoning or has not merely plenty of room for books but the most modern means of keeping them safe and available Some public concern about filling those shelves and stacks emerged a few years ago in formation of the Friends of the Library now a group of some 500 persons who through membership dues memorial gifts and other special contributions are making possible the purchase of needed unusual books and collections for which the acquisition budget could not provide May the present 500-member Friends of the Library flower into a 5000-member group Haskell some of the most incisive are drawn out too long Comedy often a matter of knov when to let up The film co profit from some new editing though I must say ft would be hard to pick jest which footage to consign to the cutting-room floor Then there is Natalio Wopd poor Natalie so lovely and so mechanical not that jjfje act but that her acting is such an exposed process One sees the cafe culation behind every narrowing of the eyes every ftnv flinch of a smile and it ian wonder that even in her best scenes the other more credible characters who grab the focus Culp is just right as her fyqg-band his every affectations! earnest it almost hurts Bqt Gould never again be remembered as Mr Barbrh Streisand) and Miss Cannon are sublime What they project so well is angst Gould is slightly puffy with a pleading face that can go wicked or desperate as a marvelous Index of inner to swing or not to swing that is the frustration Miss Alice has a voice and smile that hover just cm the brink of neurotic cataclysm and seeing her under (tress- which she nearly always can make you writhe empathy Well even if Bob 1 Alice delight at pense the film missed A Christinas role it is a gladsome gift ery means of wheedling threat and little-boy pathos to turn on his turned-off wife And the best passage in the film has Alice visiting a psychiatrist who makes her so nervous with his knowing gaze that she spills a nightmare of Freudian slips giggling all the while in the ghastly awareness of what saying THE TED-AUCE portions of the film are the most successful partly because Gould and Miss Cannon are the better players (more about that anon) but also because they represent us Everysquare up against conflicting urges to break out or duck further into their conventional shells But an engaging thing about the film in sum is that it contains first-class comic writing and a perceptive direction which achieve something of the Nichols-May effect I mean the effect of actual life only barely enlarged seen through a keyhole at the choicest instants of its absurdity The best passages seem overheard and overseen like an idiotic conversation by bus passengers in the next seat Mazursky knows his timing so well that there are endless tensions in tho rhythms of speech and the loaded silences His camera hangs in for some wicked eloseups (the film is a study in facial candor) and it picks up details of environment and decor that ring damningly true I remember one glimpse of a hnge plaster bead the face of an El Taco roadside eatery true that many scenes appoint themselves spiritual guides to Ted and Alice (Gould and Miss Cannon) who being more conventional to start with find the road toward liberation a good deal bumpier As all those conjunctions in the title somehow suggest the film is more a series of comic set pieces than a linear narrative It opens on a howler of visit to one of those mystical soul-training a kind of Maine Chance for sweating off spiritual inhibitions Bob and Carol become hooked during a with everybody wallowing on the floor0 while the leader of me as your urges them to blurt out whatever pops into their heads- he commands louder I want to see ugly One girl weeps and the camera is right there to catch the false eyelashes peeling off It all ends with everyone in a great bathos-weltering love heap from which Boh and Carol emerge enlightened to the notion that is always Carol tries out this theory in another funny scene with a restaurant headwaiter horrified at her aggressive insistence on communicating really communicating with him But the real test comes when Bob and Carol find they can each have little affairs on the side so long as they level with each other true loving communion (Bob almost fails the test One of the best moments comes when he wrestles with his rage while afternoon lover cowers in a locked bedroom) Meantime Ted and Alice having farther to develop from squareness watch their new freedom with something between alarm and envy The knowledge is so traumatic that it even puts a crimp in their own sex life There is a beaut of a bedroom episode in which Ted usee ev volved in the earlier gift remains unchanged Money with which to build and operate and books for instructional purposes in the widest sense would appear to be as essential as ever The increasing importance of periodicals and microfilmed information has merely tended to expand the usefulness of academic libraries without altering their central function in either the learning or research process BY CONTEMPORARY STANDARDS to be sure it might look as if that minister in colonial New England had bought posthumous fame at a bargain no matter how unintentionally Such a conclusion would be misleading The 780 or so pounds he left to the future Harvard University represented a substantial sum for its time and place And hooks I gather were exceedingly scarce His in short was hardly an inconsiderable bequest Nor was the General Court selling its name for the proverbial pittance (Like John Harvard himself many leading citizens of the colony then were graduates of Cambridge University They knew the value of a formal education) Ia view of the importance of adequate library resources the institution we now know as the Kansas City division of the University of Missouri obviously had been allowed to labor under a serious handicap far too long Not that the trustees of the forma University of Kansas City were wholly unaware of this deficiency As their little original library building became patently overcrowded and collections began to be scattered dll over the campus they had preliminary plans drawn for a more suitable structure But these were to remain unimplemented as long as the school was entirely dependent on private support Alas the trustees found they had many other primary needs to meet Simply to keep their modest enterprise going at all faculty salaries must be paid and classroom space supplied along with at least a minimal provision for laboratory work Libraries are ordinarily regarded as attractive ob ms ADDITIONS TO INDEX TO THE ARTS SUNDAY DECIMUR Si CHORAL MUSIC PROS Pontifical Choir of Kansu City conducted by Fr Ambrose Karels 3:30 Nelson Gallery No charge WEDNCSDAY DSCRMRER 31 CHRISTMAS OR YESTBRYEAR-Kanau City Museum exhibit close at the ward Parkway center viWv- DETAIL of a landscape by Wang Hui dated 1660 i.