THEMES AND EPISODES

The fifth volume in what we have previously termed ""a felicitious collaboration"" divides into Stravinsky's commentary and Craft's diary. The composer talks of art and automation, talent and the population, new music, himself (at a wry remove). He writes program notes (three sacred choruses, four etudes for orchestra, the Dumbarton Oaks concerto, Elegy for Kennedy, etc.), answers interviewers from Show and Seventeen and the BBC, reviews Schoenberg's letters and Wagner's prose, pens letters and ripostes and an obituary of T.S. Eliot. From Robert Craft's diaries comes mention of places and people--Auden, Huxley, Camus, Giacometti--as he tours Europe, the Middle East, South America with I.S.--more of environments and encounters than of the master himself. It is all satisfyingly urbane with few technicalities to dissuade the intelligent lay reader.