The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 8

8 ARTS GUARDIAN 1972 Saturday pop WHEN ROGER GRAEF was a rising 23, a New Yorker two years out of Harvard, grappling with his first chance to do experimental drama on American television for CBS in the days when Iumet was still directing for them, he watched the fall of the organisation men. "All the people who had played the corporation game, had done terrible soap operas and studio talks in order to get to do drama not our kind of drama, but the big plays they were all fired the same day. You know, it was this brutal way of firing people, so that they turn up one morning, and their desk has just gone. All those people with their houses in Westchester and their mortgages. I'll never forget the looks on their faces they were wandering round with these slips of paper in their bands, and no desk to put them on." It was not so much bad communication as bad news communicated in a brutal way (Graef wasn't fired he was and is freelance to the core).

But it gives perhaps some clue why, when the BBC commissioned him to do a programme about the English language, what emerges two and a half years later is "The Space between Words" a series of five films that started on BBC-2 last Tuesday. For the more he considered language and words, the more he realised that what he had to do was to look behind the communication We started with two goals just to show what communication was. loosen it from all the stuff that had grown round that catchword, and just show it happening to someone else in a situation the viewer involved in. Then to say what samples can we use to show it most effectively? And I decided to look at it in institutions where communication is supposed to be happening a good factory, a family, a school, diplomacy and politics because this would be the fairest test. We didn't want to score easv points." They found the household thev used for "Family," this week's film, by advertising for volunteers.

Thev picked "the Browns," moved in with them, arranged for them to consult Aaron Esterson, family therapist and collaborator of R. Laing. Thev shot the consultations and ended with 24 hours of film, to be shown in full to selected audiences in California, where KCET who chipped in with the BBC for some of the cost will be screening the programmes. Graef and his team worried about their effect on the familv was deeply resented and responsible for much of the trouble that followed. One of the more extreme pieces of news in the whole series.

Because Graef reckons that they are situations with which viewers can identify and he hopes they will that the films will stir talk over post-telly drinks, and later go to more specialised audiences to help sharpen their response to our problem families and labour relations hang-ups. Did someone whisper Ken Loach So in "Family" there's a problem teenager, discord, rough dialogue even the same cameraman, Charles Stewart, who shot Loach's "Family Life." But the parallels seem to stop there Graefs work is pure documentary. Loach is concerned with extremes, Graef with the norm and what can go wrong within the limits of the norm. And that may be partly why the effects of the films are cumulative; he talks about the drama of detail, and the way Stewart knowing what Graef wants hunts for that detail. Which connects with Graefs feeling about the scale of television presentation.

The longer it goes on, he believes, the more interesting it becomes. The drama of detail builds up. He is out to show us how we live. He came to it through the conventional drama producing plays off-Broadway and in repertory, waiting for the call to CBS. So he had 25 plays and operas under his belt by the time he was 26.

Then to England, on spec, where he directed Tennessee Williams's Period of Adjustment at the Royal Court and in the West End, made a prizewinning documentary film about thalidomide children, a string of later ones for television. He is 35 now and has settled in London with his wife. He would like to do a series about cities, and he could divide his time between directing and a deeper involvement with the running of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In a sense, with The Space Between Words" he has almost abolished the traditional rdle of the director. He has tried to make it a team operation, involving some of them at least at every stage and in every decision though ultimately it remains his responsibility.

Others have tried likewise, but he reckons that he has taken it further than most. Yet self-negation has its pitfalls, and Stewart is so good a cameraman, says Graef, that all the shaky shots and dubious lighting that used to mark the work of vour starkly realistic directors have gone. People look at Graefs documentaries and say "who wrote the script," when real people in real situations are the only script there is. Maybe it's a kind of compliment. television by PETER FIDDICK FIRST THE GOOD NEWS.

Somehow, most of the six finalists in our great allegedly national search (bu who picks the competitors) for a Song for Europe this year seem more like modern pop songs than usual. This is not to say that hearing all six twice over in "It's Cliff Richard" on Saturday was a lasting musical experience. But at least the six songs together didn't give us the usual repetition of international civil servant music the EuSon Song. Contest has engen-dered-straight jig-a-jog rtothms and zinH-boom-a-boom lyrics. Apart from the range of sounds there was even OTirfpnc! of the more current poffnternatfonalism.

of the aU-the-world's-a-melting-pot, why can't we all get together, make love not war. variety. Which might not matter one way or other when we get to tiie great multi-lingual computer night itself, but has at least made the six-week local eliminating contest somewhat less of a drag than heretofore. On the other hand, the unwonted luxury of hearing six new songs in one peak-hour mass-entertainment programme provided a salutary reminder of how drably unm-ventive this huge area is the rest of the time. In Concert has been a light in the gloom these past weeks, and a clear demonstration of what we are missing elsewhere.

It really is a quite extraordinary phenomenon more so, I suspect, than the group-boom of the early sixties that there are so many modern troubadours capable of holding an audience solo for at least half an hour and above all with songs they have mostly written themselves. Stanley Dorfman's production, the performers silhouetted among the lights, monitors, and paraphernalia of the darkened studio, cameras moving gently among them, has caught the live atmosphere admirably. Set against this, back in ratings land we find such an all-pervasive ethos of Rolf Harris sings The Black and White Minstrels to Petula Clark that even the more spirited Humperdinck on the one and or Sir Lew's procession of Saturday Variety" veterans on the other seem only minor deviations from the milksop cultural norm. picture of Roger Graef by Frank Martin Graefi aumtifl He was commissioned to make a television programme on language what evolved was a series of five films exploring where no-one had been before. HUGH HE6ERT reports makes them significant is who says them to whom.

Somebody's got to know the piece of news first, but how it's passed on, how it's shared is a crucial diagram of the whole relationship between the two parties. That example would apply to the family film, or to any of the others." One essential piece of news in the family was that the wife's first marriage was breaking up and it was withheld from the children until the last moment a silence, a space between words, that a coup into the corridors of secret diplomacy at a UN session in Geneva. You know, there's a scene where the American ambassador loses his cool, and then looks round to see who's overheard him but he doesn't look at the cameraman, who's right beside him." By then the crew had ceased to appear as outsiders. "What's really central to all these situations," says Graef," is the structure of the relationships. Simple phrases like 'I don't know' what with them, and six months later are still in friendly contact with the family.

Directing the series became, in a way, an exercise in finding relevant situations and simply recording them. Usually Graef would not even be in the room just the cameraman and sound man. They went into a comprehensive school, and followed one teacher and her class; into the politicking huddles behind a Senate investigating committee in Washington and their problem was the teenage son. with a record of declining school results, petty theft, and progressive withdrawal from family relationships. But the team were reassured by the social workers who had been dealing THE HALLE at the Free Trade Hall by Gerald Larner THE HALLE Concerts Society did all it could to warn the public that, because of an anticipated power cut at the Free Trade Hall, the start of last night's concert would be postponed from 7 30 to 8 45.

But there's not much you can do on Saturday about a Sunday concert. It was announced in the Manchester Evening News and via BBC radio, but the large majority of the audience turned ud at least 95 minutes early which save those who wanted it 95 minutes for a drink (or two) beforehand. So. far from anger (aggravated by the fact that, though there was a voltage reduction, there was no cut after all) the mood was one of either auiet British resignation or even actual merriment. Anyway, the programme was rearranged so that those who had naid for Irmgard Seefried could hear her Dart of the concert before the interval.

Miss Seefried's major contribution was Bartok's "Five Village Scenes." The story behind this somewhat unsatisfactory performance is long and complex. But. to cut it short (and perhaps even more complex), what she was singing was the vocal part of the original voice-and-piano version (1924). accompanied in the first two sonss by a new and modestly effective orchestration by Antal Dorati and in the last three sonss by Bartok's own orchestration (1927). However.

Bartok's orchestration was calculated to combine with at least four female voices, not one. So Miss Seefried was swanraed in places, which was even less surprising to anyone who happened to notice that most of the orchestral strings, rather than the solo quintet Bart6k scored for. were involved. Or perhaps James Loughran decided that the solo strings would cut through the voice too easily? Anyway, though the little cuts Miss Seefried made did not matter, the failure of the voice to dominate did. It was a too polite performance in a bourgeois German which (in spite of the accent) reflected little of the wild, backwoods quality of the Slovak folksong original.

However, Bart6k's superb orchestration genuine Miraculous and "night music" in style was a revelation. Mr Lough-ran conducted an orchestral performance so colourful and so idiomatic that someone should ask him (nicely) to do it again with solo strings and either four or eight mezzo sopranos. Miss Seefried compensated for Bartdk's disappointment with charming Strauss "Traum durch die Dammerung." AHerseelen." and "Zueignung" all sung in that intimate, disarmingly domestic way of hers. And Mr Loughran allowing, with studied casualness, a clarinet to start the performance when his back was turned conducted a virtuoso performance of Enescu's "Romanian Rhapsody" No 1. It was splendidly showy and highly effective, synthetic though the rhapsody is.

Perhaps someone should ask him nicely to do Liszt's Mazeppa some time. NEW RECORDS by Edward Greenfield HARD as you have to look for the name, there it is in very small type on the sleeve of Ken Russell's "Boy Friend record. Peter Maxwell Davies. And I wouldn't mind betting that "The Augmented Boy Friend Band" is the Fires of London in disguise (Columbia SCXA9251). There is no mistaking the clarinet of Alan Hacker providing an exuberant twenties-style yapping obbligato in number after number.

When Russell has updated the story to the thirties, it is ironic that Davies's arrangement of Sandy Wilson's score gets closer than ever before to twenties sound, sousaphone and all. The honky-tonk piano is characteristic too. No Maxwell Davies follower should miss the honky-tonk cadenza in Won't you Charleston with me but it is a pity that only songs are included and none of Davies's purely instrumental numbers. That might have taxed the pop customers. Luciano Berio too has shown that he can let his hair down.

Every one of the 12 folk songs he arranged (and in two instances wrote himself) for Cathy Berberian is a winner. At last she has recorded the set with Berio conducting the Juilliard Ensemble (RCA SB 6850). and the result is compulsive listening from the haunting melancholy of "Black is the colour" and the Armenian Loosin Yelav" to the throaty roar of the Sicilian fishwife song and the galloping exuberance of the Azerbaijani Love Song. That set of folk-songs will for the avant-gardist be merely an aperitif for the major offering of Berio's s'Epifanie." a collection of instrumental pieces interspersed with memorably original settings of Proust, Machado, Joyce, Sanguinetti, Claude Simon, and Brecht all in the original languages. It is a tough work, but one which in its movement from dream-like imagining to tough reality should provide even the unskilled listener with enough to grasp first time and more on repeated hearings.

The greatest pity here is that the words are not included in the programme notes as they were for the BBC Symphony Orchestra's performance two years ago. I can only hope that RCA will be persuaded to provide an insert for the disc. On the record the composer draws brilliant playing from the BBC musicians, but it is Miss Berberian, with her extraordinary concentration, who over and over again steals the limelight the moment she starts her virtuoso brand of singing and speaking. It is time some record company signed her up to sing more than avant-garde music. review STAN KENTON by Ronald Atkins UNTIL NOW, the boom yesterday's jazz orchestras visiting this country has missed out on one seminal figure.

During the past week, however, Stan Kenton fans have taken the chance to hear their idol again after several years and, to judge by reactions at the Hammersmith Odeon on Saturday, they are enjoying themselves. The days are past when Kenton would announce a cataclysmic musical breakthrough whenever he formed a new band, but he seems to have retained a surprising degree of support without the aid of controversy. Let's 'orget its content for the moment and say that Kenton's music today compares very well with that of his rivals. Tho newer numbers at least sound as if they were written for him, which is not true of such bands as Woody Herman's or Benny Goodman's, while old arrangements of Artistry in Rhythm" and "The Peanut Vendor" have been faithfully updated. The trombones retain that characteristically plummy sound, and one loses count of the discordant trumpet passages.

Even when cashing in on a modern pop, Kenton puts such themes as Love Story and MacArthur Park through his personal ringer until they can barely be distinguished from his other pieces. Everything is per? formed with the immaculate precision that one expects from him, and the very comprehensive scoring means that the lack of strong soloists, which affects the bands of Herman or Buddy Rich, here becomes largely irrelevant As for rhythm, drummer John Von Ohlen impresses me just as he did with Herman years ago in spite of Kenton's music being so difficult to swing. The truth remains that one should not be deluded by surface gloss into accepting Kenton's own valuation of his band. I's not so long since Duke Ellington played here, and for all its violent discords Kenton's music by contrast has a curiously antiseptic quality. Where Ellington exploits the sounds of individual instruments, Kenton's arrangers impose a monolithic uniformity on each section.

Far from being progressive, his music is firmly based on such fulsomely romantic works as Warsaw Concerto" or "Cornish Rhapsody." If these were rewritten for a brass-heavy jazz hand they would be pretty close to the average Kenton number. Granted this, his music has weathered the years with success. THE OMEGA MAN by David Bridgman SINCE the Bomb, man's self-destructive urges have inspired a number of cautionary tales in the cinema. "The Omega Man (director Boris Segal), which has its first British showing at selected ABCs at Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester this week, is one of the best of them. The opening is riveting.

Charlton Heston, driving through the sunny, empty streets of an American city, "A Summer Place" swooning away on his portable cassette player, suddenly looses a burst of gunfire at a silhouette in a second-storey window. He is the survivor of a bacteriological war, roaming the city alone by day and at night embattled in his luxury apartment by victims of the plague who have handed together to eradicate all traces of the civilisation of the wheel. An alert and intelligent script by John William and Joyce H. Corring ton, based on Richard Matheson's novel "I am Legend," draws on elements of the horror genre the plague victims are cowled and fear the light, a life-saving serum needs blood and underpins the action with some relevant arguments on scientific progress without becoming portentous. The film is able to absorb symbols and allusions without sacrificing the pace and tension of its thriller format Typical of its approach is the matter-of-fact presentation of its black heroine.

Matheson's novel was filmed once before as "The Last Man on Earth," made in Italy in 1964 with Vincent Price in the lead. On that occasion the story was developed as a vampire chiller. This version is the most exciting and provocative SF since "Planet of the Apes." Moon by Tadek. Beutlich Polish rope tricks by MERETE BATES BBC NORTHERN ORCHESTRA in Leeds WILLIE ROUGH at the Edinburgh Lyceum lich indisputably a poet. The drawings, the flat tapestries besides his own original development of his medium seem almost dull, if competent The exhibition of his work he is a Pole who now teaches at Camberwell Scboo of Art continues until February 18.

In contrast, the Rumanian artists' statements at the Warrington Art Gallery are practically incomprehensible. Although the exhibition (until February 26) suffers from consisting more of photographs of the artists adulated by earnest young women in spectacles with cups of coffee than of their work, it is dull and derivative. Even if metal reliefs have been sprayed like you would spray a motor car. this innovation in technique does not make up for dull shapes and nondescript colour. The work is, in fact, conservative, not least the wood sculpture of the Vice President of the Union of Artists: Ouidu Maitec, bor.

ingly flanged, blocked, and holed. Of all, Pavel Ilic's great, Wg balls of wool made out of basket at least had humour. Ion Bitzan's lucid, abstract drawings of what looked like stick-inged pipes or mattresses slumped against a wall had a pale attraction. TADEK BEUTLICH'S "statement'5 has the practical economy of the craftsman his tapestries aren't fiat, they use unspun jute looped, tufted and sewn to emphasise a three-dimensional quality. At that, he could be describing a new door-mat But, hung in the gallery of Didsbury College of Education, Manchester, his work astounds.

There is a rugged flamboyant strength yoked accurately into vivid symbols. Each work stands for an object: "Sunflower," "Bird of Prey," "Sun," or "Moon." But it sucks out the essense in such a vigorous, condensed way: the original would wilt alongside. The "Sun-flower" has sharp, reaching stamens, a writhing knot of petals, trailing wraiths of stem to the root It glows gold and burnished bronze, bleaches away to dried silver. It is not only in texture and form, but in colour that Beutlich plumbs passion. Perhaps the most potent images are of the "Moon and Sun." As if the one stands for a fragile, opalescent order the other for raging, turbulent chaos.

It is this other dimension, behind the objects, that makes Beut- 4, by Cordelia Oliver IF YOU ARE writing a play about Clydcside and your ear is sensitive enough to reflect typical attitudes through local speech patterns, humourous and otherwise, you are more than half way home. Bill Bryden does just that in Willie Rough," now having its first production at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Cast to perfection, it has you on its side from the beginning. The time is 1914, the place Greenock; implicit in the story of a shipyard drunk is the birfih of "Red Clydeside" in idealism, anger and passionate discontent Willie Rough is a riveter, the shop steward who, war or no war, tabes the men out in order to right a wrong. Eventually he is victimised by an angry management after a short jail sentence for publishing a potentially subversive article in a workers' magazine.

If the play has a basic fault it is the too eren pace, the lack of strong forward motion (its "biggest" scene, the death of Old Hughie though Fulton Mackay's virtuosity makes it good theatre is really more operatic than functional). Geoffrey Scott has reduced the by Brian Newbould THERE ARE undoubtedly hetter symphonies by Vaughan Williams than his "London," and Leeds con-certgoers who know their VW will hope to hear one of them before the end of this centenary year. Meanwhile, Saturday's rather good performance of the "London" by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra reminded us of the roots of his later symphonic excellence (in the untitled symphonies). Here was a composer for whom an awareness of environment was a spur to self-awareness. As yet the fertile response to the English outdoors was too picturesquely discursive for a medium that demands concentration.

True, the four movements are nicely differentiated and the unifying devices are there. But the exterior trappings of a symphony do not hide the lack of a symphonic core. As a rhapsodic soundscape, however, a diverting and heart-warming experience was made of it by the BBC NSO. There was a judicious blend among the brass, with the right -proportion of tonal body and edge. The unison of trumpet with low flutes in the slow movement was as haunting as ever it was.

Conducting without the score, Walter Susskind took an overall view. More often than not he let the crowding incidents slot tidily into place, but the distraction caused by clipping the longer rhythmic values in the score's less active passages was not worth the time saved. Mr Susskind's Haydn (Symphony No. 88) was likewise uncomplacent, from the ceremonious opening (you could have driven the coach and four between the first two upbeatdownbeat chords) to the finale in which a fund of effervescent wind sounds was brought forth exaggeratedly, as needs be in Leeds Town Hall. I can think of no baroque concerto less likely to survive that mischievous acoustic with impunity than Bach's major for violin, with its busy solo-writing across the strings and its detailed accompaniment.

Those who heard the radio broadcast at home are best placed to judge whether Iona Brown was' as sublime a soloist in its outer movements as she was in the slow movement scenery to a highly evocative minimum laterally sliding screens of brickwork and corrugated iron, and a few necessary practical props like the bar, table, benches in the dockside pub which acts as a kind of forum. The play finally turns on a confrontation; not a grand showdown between man and management but a momentary collision man-to-man, when Willie comes back hopefully from jail to be told by Jake Adams, the foreman, that his job has been filled on orders from aibove. AH along you have sensed an unspoken affinity between these two the surface-hard Jake with mind and body equally tightly self-contained (Roddy McMillan, most economical of actors, finds a wealth of nuance to suggest all this) and the younger Willie, intelligent and principled, played by James Grant as though his own middle name were integrity. The brief bitter clash across the width of the stage lasts only a moment, but the dilemma and disillusionment stay with you all the way home. The author directed a cast which included Joseph Brady, Callum Mills, John Cairney.

dare Richards, and Eileen McCallum..