Word: bassos
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...LIGHT INFANTRY BALL (476 pp.)-Hamilton Basso-Doubleday...
Gold Braid & Hoop Skirts. Author Basso. 54. is dealing with the same fictional South Carolina town that framed his 1954 bestseller. The View from Pompey's Head, which told of present-day passions in the Tidewater South. The events of this new book are laid a century earlier but. despite the gold braid uniforms and the hoop skirts, the idiom is racily contemporary (says high-born Arabella of a suitor: "All he wanted was a chance to get under my skirts...
Like earlier Hamilton Basso heroes. Plantation Owner John Bottomley is clearly derived from John P. Marquand. He is handsome but not terribly bright, brimful of ideals that make life difficult for him. Though often obstinate, he is invariably polite, and when older men say something nauseous, he answers "Yes, sir" in a mildly disapproving tone. When women quarrel, he never understands that they are quarreling about him. The girls are pure Marquand, too. always prattling merrily about nothing while the men brood, and when noble-souled John says something portentous to them, they respond with irrelevancies-"You need a haircut...
...great Russian basso, Chaliapin was born and trained in Moscow, flew to the welcoming arms of Paris in 1925. There in 1929 he painted the austere countenance and long, strong hands of Sergei Rachmaninoff-possibly the best canvas in last week's show. Portraiture is Chaliapin's favored ground, but he tackles many things with equal zest, from laughing ballet dancers to glowing landscapes and stark religious works. Among his most recent canvases: a shockingly dramatic Crucifixion, as seen from the foot of the Cross, with knees twisted in pain and a face cloaked in shadow...
...other. West Germany's Hamburg TV wedded faces and voices in a topnotch production of Smetana's bucolic opera, The Bartered Bride. This exercise in "controlled schizophrenia" (used before in movies) began three months ago with tape recordings of such fine opera stars as Soprano Anny Schlemma, Basso Oskar Czerwenka. At show time the taped music flowed through loudspeakers as more photogenic players performed and mouthed the words. "Sacrilege on the spirit of opera," cried one German critic, but most other opera buffs seemed delighted...