Word: themes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime, most of the characters in most of the plays being produced at Harvard this fall could say about some aspect of their lives, "But, there must be some mistake!" Mistakes are, in fact, the only common theme running through a theater season that is so varied it is probably a mistake for me to claim that these plays have anything in common at all. But maybe, as they say, we can learn from our errors...
Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel; Three Intermezzi, Op. 117; Three Intermezzi, Op. 119; Rhapsody, Op. 119 No. 4 (Pianist Van Cliburn, RCA). The Handel Variations are often thought of as a piece that only a pianist, or piano buff, could love. In one of his most appealing albums in years, Van Cliburn puts the lie to that. Leaping from one craggy Brahmsian peak to another as effortlessly as though playing Debussy's Clair de lune, Cliburn gives the work a warm romantic allure yet never loses hold of its classic-baroque underpinnings. What ingenuity...
Antonin Dvorak: Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81 (the Juilliard Quartet, Rudolf Firkusny pianist, Columbia; the same work played by the Cleveland Quartet, Emanuel Ax pianist, RCA). This concert perennial is easily recognized by its opening second movement theme, a sound- alike for the late 1940s popular song Nature Boy. The quintet is often said to reflect the composer's sunny, lyric disposition, and even the swift changes in tempo and sudden clouds of melancholy cannot dampen the work's high spirits. Both the Juilliard with Firkusny and the Cleveland with Ax are faithful to the Dvorak spirit...
Swados finds the simplest statement of her theme in two works of Nazim Hikmet. "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" opens Cantata, celebrating an adult re-awakening to the fundamental miracle of life bursting with questions for animals and astronauts alike. "On Living" ends the show with a return to general statements on existence: "Living must be your whole occupation... Plant olives at seventy and not for your children... We must live as if one never dies...
...prose in One L, which has outrageous errors like "least painless" instead of "most painless" or "least painful"--Turow says he came to Harvard to meet his enemy. Who is the enemy? Good question. For most of One L, Turow wanders around that point, never quite explaining the theme that's supposed to tie the daily experiences together. Is it the legal system as it sustains class society and the state? Is it Harvard Law School as it breeds privilege and promotes inequality? Just what enemy prompted Turow, who apparently considers himself a left-winger from the late...