Wednesday, December 25

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERTS WITH LEONARD BERNSTEIN (CBS, 5-6 p.m.).* The selection of Richard Strauss's tone poem Don Quixote is reminiscent of Bernstein's widely acclaimed debut with the Philharmonic in 1943 with a program which included the Strauss work.

VLADIMIR HOROWITZ: A CONCERT AT CARNEGIE HALL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A Christmas gift of 50 uninterrupted minutes of a virtuoso piano recital. Repeat.

KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). "The Mitzi Gaynor Christmas Show" is a Yuletide romp with Ed McMahon playing Santa Claus and Mitzi as Raggedy Ann. Other guests include Cyril Ritchard, Tony Tanner.

THE LEGEND OF SILENT NIGHT (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). The life of Composer Franz Gruber, played by James Mason and narrated by Kirk Douglas. Adapted from a story by Paul Gallico.

Friday, December 27

THE VIEW FROM THE WHITE HOUSE WITH MRS. LYNDON B. JOHNSON (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). In dialogue with ABC's Howard K. Smith, Mrs. Johnson will explore her many faceted role as First Lady.

Saturday, December 28 THE PIED PIPER OF ASTROWORLD (ABC, 11 a.m. to noon). Soupy Sales stars in a musical fable set in Houston's Astroworld amusement park with Lesley Gore, the Muppets and The First Edition.

Sunday, December 29

AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE CHAMPION SHIP GAME (NBC, 1 p.m. to conclusion). The Eastern Division Champions--the New York Jets--meet the winner from the West in New York's Shea Stadium.

N.F.L CHAMPIONSHIP (CBS, 2 p.m. to conclusion). The winners of the Eastern and Western Conference vie for a trip to the Sugar Bowl and a showdown with the American Football League.

SAGA OF WESTERN MAN (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). An opportunity to see again the critically acclaimed "The Road to Gettysburg," an account of the adventures of two soldiers, a Yank (Kevin McCarthy) and a Rebel (David Carradine).

Monday, December 30

WHITE PAPER: THE ORDEAL OF THE AMERICAN CITY (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Boston and Boston's Mayor Kevin White are featured in the second of a three-part series on the urban crisis.

Tuesday, December 31 TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) opposite Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore and Richard Jaeckel.

CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENTS REPORT-PART I (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Eric Sevareid is moderator as Charles Collingwood, David Culhane, Richard C. Hottelet, Marvin Kalb, Peter Kalischer and Morley Safer review the major events of 1968 and the prospects for 1969.

THEATER

On Broadway

PROMISES, PROMISES is a Neil Simon musical to remember other musicals by: it is slick, amiable and derivative. With a plot line borrowed from the Wilder-Diamond film The Apartment and a structure copied from How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the show is not so much viewed as deja vu'd.

JIMMY SHINE is an attempt at an inner journey by Playwright Murray Schisgal. The trouble is that the trip leads to nowhere. Jimmy Shine is a transparent character. What makes him a winning loser is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance. Hoffman takes thimblefuls of humor, absurdity, poignance, honesty, desire and passion and drains them as if they were foaming goblets of dramatic life.

KING LEAR. Lee J. Cobb plays the almost inhumanly difficult title role with an all-involving humanity in this revival by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.

ZORBA is a sleek and synthetic musical version of the Kazantzakis novel in which Herschel Bernardi clodhops through the role of Zorba. The songs and dances, possessing neither virility nor ethnic veracity, hardly ever evoke the characteristic tone of Levantine lament.

THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY races through Richard Wilbur's lithe translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope with a light touch. The best thing about the play is Brian Bedford's smug Acaste.

Off Broadway

BIG TIME BUCK WHITE starts as a genial put-on with five officers of a Black Power group ricocheting around the stage in an orgy of black humor. It becomes a cold put-down with the arrival at the lectern of Dick Williams as Buck White. Answering questions from the audience that are designed to give Whitey the message about Black Power, he is more of a bore than a bombshell after the antics of the five clowns. The entire cast has been with the play since the beginning--including a four-month run in Los Angeles' embattled Watts district. Their three years together have paid off in the fine, comic ensemble playing that all but counteracts the soporific effect of big Buck White and his preachment.

AMERICANA PASTORAL. The citizens of a deprived South Carolina town find that the savior who will revive their cotton mill is black. The town's rejection of prosperity on these terms, and the explosion that results, might have provided the occasion for a dramatic exploration of attitudes and tensions. But Playwright Yabo Yablonsky's formalistic approach to his story keeps the action in chiaroscuro.

RECORDINGS

More Mahler

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), one of the most popular conductors of his day, saw to it that his Faustian symphonies and yearning song cycles were performed as often as possible. But he knew as well as anyone that his music was way ahead of its day. "My time will come," he said. And now it has. Today the record companies lavish the kind of attention on him that they used to reserve for Beethoven and Brahms. Some choice items from a recent batch of LPs:

SYMPHONY NO. 4, BRUNO WALTER AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Odyssey); RAFAEL KUBELIK AND THE BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY (Deutsche Grammophon); DAVID OISTRAKH AND THE MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC (Angel/Melodiya). This seraphic, fairy-tale score is the best introduction to Mahler. Bruno Walter's 23-year-old classic recording is rechanneled for stereo, with less bass than the original mono, but more polish in the middles and highs. Those who want a modern recording will like Kubelik's lithe and luminous version. The interpretation by Violinist-turned-Conductor Oistrakh is, unfortunately, unsympathetic and at times eccentric.

SYMPHONY NO. 5, BRUNO WALTER AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC and KINDERTOTENLIEDER, KATHLEEN FERRIER WITH WALTER AND THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC (Odyssey, two LPs). Two more stereo re-channelings of early Walter recordings. The symphony is especially notable for the gemutlich rendition of the adagietto. This is the movement that Leonard Bernstein conducted at Senator Robert F. Kennedy's funeral in Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Kindertotenlieder is one of the last--and one of the best--recordings made by English Contralto Kathleen Ferrier before her death in 1953.

SYMPHONY NO. 6, SIR JOHN BARBIROLLI AND THE NEW PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA (Angel, two LPs). The tragic beauty and power of this score can scarcely be matched anywhere. "It is the sum of all the suffering I have been compelled to endure at the hands of life," said Mahler. Barbirolli drains every ounce of Angst from the music, and the recording itself is superbly engineered.

DES KNABEN WUNDERHORN, ELISABETH SCHWARZKOPF, DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU, GEORGE SZELL CONDUCTING THE LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (Angel). Though not a happy composer, Mahler could be light-hearted when he turned to folk poetry. In these twelve songs--drawn from the German folk anthology The Youth's Magic Horn--he conjures up an impish world of humorous saints, sorrowful drummer boys, cuckoos and nightingales. As one would expect from such a line-up of talent, this version abounds with interpretive delights. It does not, however, outclass Angel's previous recording by Janet Baker, Geraint Evans and Conductor Wyn Morris with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which some may prefer for its lighter, wittier style.

CINEMA

THE FIXER is a relentless parable of a modern Job, based on Bernard Malamud's prize-winning novel. Under the inventive and often brilliant direction of John Frankenheimer, the actors--especially Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde--bring to the film a truly Dostoevskian resonance and moral force.

THE FIREMEN'S BALL. From a slight and funny anecdote about a group of firemen who stage a party in honor of their retiring chief, Director Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde) has fashioned a delightful parody-fable of Communist bureaucracy in pre-Dubcek Czechoslovakia.

OLIVER! A gleaming, steaming, rum plum pudding of a musical. Dickens' sociological sting is gone, but in its place is a Christmas package of breathtaking sets, period costumes, and a full-throated, joyous score by Lionel Bart. Best of a twinkling cast are Ron Moody as Fagin and a Toby jug of a boy named Jack Wild as The Artful Dodger.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. An epic film about the history and future of man, brilliantly directed by Stanley Kubrick. The special effects are mind-blowing.

YELLOW SUBMARINE. The Beatles appear in cartoon form as the stars of this eclectic animated film about a voyage to Pepperland on a yellow submarine. The real star of the trip, however, is Animator Heinz Edelmann, whose visual puns and graphic artistry dazzle the eye.

PRETTY POISON. Murder for laughs is the subject of this tidy little satire, which features highly professional performances by Tony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, and excellent direction by Noel Black, 31, a newcomer to Hollywood.

BULLITT. Steve McQueen plays it fast and supercool as a San Francisco police lieutenant on the hunt in this modish, violent thriller about current life styles in the underworld.

FUNNY GIRL is a loud, brassy musical biography of Fanny Brice that is tailor-made for the loud, brassy talents of Barbra Streisand.

COOGAN'S BLUFF. Director Don Siegal, hailed as a minor genius by French critics, proves that his reputation is no Gallic caprice with this tough film about an Arizona sheriff (Clint Eastwood) who travels to New York to extradite a prisoner.

WEEKEND. Jean-Luc Godard excoriates the bourgeoisie in a savage satire that would be sharper were its Maoist political harangues not so dull.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE ARMS OF KRUPP, by William Manchester. A flawed but massive and cumulatively fascinating chronicle links Europe's most famous weaponmaking family with Germany's persistent thrust toward world power.

TURPIN, by Stephen Jones. In this first novel, a series of unlikely events and uncertain conversations is transformed into a curiously engaging book by the author's gift for gentle satire.

THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B., by J. P. Donleavy. The comic and sensual adventures of a rich and dreamy young man in Paris and Dublin. Donleavy at his best.

INSTANT REPLAY: THE GREEN BAY DIARY OF JERRY KRAMER. A succinct answer to that overasked question: What happened to the Packers this year? Simple. Vince Lombardi is no longer coach. The Grand Old Martinet of pro football raged, cussed, threatened and coaxed his athletes into winning every Sunday, and Kramer, his all-pro right guard, bears perceptive witness to his antics.

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL (four volumes), meticulously edited and annotated by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. A remarkable record of the political and intellectual history of Western Europe during the '30s and '40s by the brilliant author of Animal Farm and 1984.

O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. O'Neill did what only a major artist can do: he made his public share his private demon. In this excellent, painstaking biography, the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer traces the tensions that defined the playwright's life.

THE CAT'S PAJAMAS AND WITCH'S MILK, by Peter De Vries. In these two grotesquely humorous novellas, a gifted, discontented man works hard at being a failure, and a gentle, down-at-heart woman struggles with domestic disaster.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (2 last week)

2. A Small Town in Germany, Le Carre (1)

3. Preserve and Protect, Drury (3)

4. Airport, Hailey (4)

5. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (5)

6. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (6)

7. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (10)

8. And Other Stories, O'Hara (7)

9. The Senator, Pearson (9) 10. Couples, Updike

NONFICTION

1. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (5)

2. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (2)

3. Instant Replay, Kramer (4)

4. On Reflection, Hayes (9)

5. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten

6. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (1)

7. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (6)

8. Andrew Wyeth, Meryman

9. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux (10)

10. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (3)

* All times E.S.T.

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