Satyagraha

Call me weird, but my musical tastes encompass both the minimalist approach of Philip Glass (all five notes) and the all-over-the-map progressive rock noodlings of Yes. In Lionel Richie's words, I'm easy, musically-speaking (easy like Sunday morning, to be precise). Still, even I (who can get a straight-faced groove on singing "feelin' 7-Up, I'm feelin' 7-Up") have my limits, and this 1983 German production of Glass's opera exploring the connection between Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence (satyagraha) and the writings/lives of Tolstoy, the Indian poet Tagore, and Martin Luther King, Jr. comfortably exceeds them with its combination of what looks like bad performance art and what sounds like a record endlessly skipping over the same passage. Backed by a libretto comprised of text from the epic Bhagavad-Gita, this originally made for television production suffers from a substandard Dolby stereo music track and bafflingly poor camerawork (a good percentage of the production is seen in a slightly unfocused long shot--making the action onstage difficult to see). Not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)