"MOST of all, I wanted to write a story," says John Demos in the preface to this book. And he does, with all the panache of an accomplished novelist. Narrative history was, he writes, in "deep eclipse" when he was learning to become a...

HANDEL Messiah * John Rutter, cond; Joanne Lunn (sop); Melanie Marshall (alt); James Gilchrist (ten); Christopher Purves (bar); Royal PO; Cambridge Singers * HENDRICKSON PUBLISHERS 56126X (2 CDs 136:34 *) The popularity of Messiah makes it difficult for us to comprehend that for...

It would be convenient to be able to say that Ken Russell's "Savage Messiah" is bad strictly on formal and technical grounds, but that would, I think, be fundamentally a lie. It is very poor technically; but that's not all that makes it bad…. Is there any other movie director with the flair and imagination and, yes, the force of Ken Russell who has so little actual command of what is generally considered "film technique"? "Savage Messiah" starts...

Compared to other Russell movies, Savage Messiah is actually rather restrained, although like them it gets involved in role playing, theatrical behavior, comedy, madness, and the transcending of everyday life. As Tchaikovsky does in The Music Lovers, Gaudier equates life and art. Like Tchaikovsky's women or Sister Jeanne in The Devils, Sophie lives in an ethereal realm of fantasy harshly at odds with the surrounding material world—in this case, a world of starving artist's poverty that ...