Television: Apr. 5, 1968

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THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Uta Hagen leads the APA in a gentle and balanced production of Chekhov's commentary on the sad absurdity of human beings who, unable to adapt themselves to the changes of history, grope about in a half-light that may be twilight and may be dawn. Pantagleize, The Show Off and Exit the King round out the repertory.

PORTRAIT OF A QUEEN is really a series of dramatied snapshots of a woman. As sensitively played by Dorothy Tutm, Victoria Regina seems only incidentally the ruler of an empire, and chiefly the ruled wife of her beloved consort Albert.

PLAZA SUITE is a ride through a tunnel of fun, flecked with a recognition of life's unfunny truths. In three playlets, Neil Simon hawks almost uninterrupted laughter, particularly in a sly satire of the Sunset Strip set, and a flailing farce about the father of a most reluctant bride.

Off Broadway

Some of the more satisfying of this season's offerings in Manhattan's smaller theaters: Ergo, a wacky expressionist exercise by Austrian Writer Jakov Lind; In Circles, an aptly named circular play by Gertrude Stein set to circular music by Al Carmines; Iphigenia in Aulis, a Euripedean antiwar drama that has lost little of its force through the centuries; The Indian Wants The Bronx, Israel Horovitz's study of the savagery that can lurk on any street; Your Own Thing, a marvelously modern, inventive and sophisticated rock version of Twelfth Night.

RECORDS

Instrumental

The familiar concerto in sonata form, with balanced themes and brilliant solos, seems to be dead, but composers still wirte concertos in the original sense of the word: simple two tonial forces opposed to each other. Some recent releases showing the directions the concerto has taken in this century:

CARTER: PIANO CONCERTO (RCA Victor). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Elliott Carter writes music for standard instruments, eschewing electronic effects and aleatory experiments. What's more, he even provides a dramatic script for this concerto. An individual (the piano) is influenced by society (the orchestra), learns that it is being misled, and ends up alienated and alone. Piano and orchestra converse in different chords like different dialects and at different tempos; swatches of sound appear in what seem desultory then frantic patterns; and at times the script calls for practically the whole Boston Symphony to damp down the valiant lone pianist, Jacob Lateiner—which seems particularly unfair since he (with a grant from the Ford Foundation) commissioned the work in the first place.

SCHOENBERG: PIANO CONCERTO AND VIOLIN CONCERTO (Columbia). A new release bringing together two earlier performances of these ripe, satisfying examples of twelve-tone composition. With Robert Craft conducting the nadian Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Glenn Gould plays the rich, almost Brahms-like piano part in the first concerto, and Israel Baker tackles the difficult violin work in the second concerto. Both pieces demonstrate that the intricacies of the dodecaphonic scale in no way limit emotional expression. "If a composer does not write from the heart, said Schoenberg, "he simply cannot produce good music." Schoenberg did both.