fine classical chorus . imparting ritual significance . Scala Theatre : the Choephori . though Mr Dimitrios Rondiris &apos;s ideas about the use of material from folksong and folkdance in accommodating a classical chorus to the modern stage had some chances of expression in his production of the Sophocles Electra last week , the real test comes with the Aeschylian equivalent , the Choephori , and its tailpiece , the Eumenides , which make up the second programme of the Greek tragedy Theatre &apos;s season . for the role of the chorus here is much more important and active , particularly in the Eumenides , than it ever is in Sophocles , and the ritual element in the drama , always a stumbling block for modern audiences , is much closer to the surface . in the first play the chorus are embodiments of right judgment in the abstract , applying the tests of religion to the situations before them and urging the characters to the proper actions even when these , mere individual human beings , may be torn by doubt . in the second they become the Furies , the embodiments of one aspect of the divine vengeance , which pursues the slayer of his own kind , even if that slaughter was divinely ordained , and finally the impersonal prophets of universal reconciliation . Mr Rondiris &apos;s handling of the chorus here is masterly throughout : in the Choephori they still perform the function of sympathetic decor , as in Electra , but if anything with more subtlety and control , and when their measured speech passes over into song the tones are , remotely but unmistakably , those taught by the orthodox liturgy - the readiest way of imparting ritual significance to their words for a modern audience . in the Eumenides they are different again ; as the Furies pursuing Orestes they take a direct part in the action , and are thus required to project emotions of their own instead of merely reflecting the emotions of the central characters . savage and weirdly masked , they swirl in a turbulent mass about the stage , eschewing until the very end the regular , balanced compositions of the earlier play . the human beings involved in the intricate working out of divine justice are relatively less important than in later Greek tragedy , but they are strongly played by actors with whom we are already familiar from Electra . the protagonist in both plays is Orestes , and Mr D Veakis has more chance than he had in the Sophocles to win us over to his rather exaggerated style of acting , though he still does not quite succeed . the Electra and Clytemnestra of this earlier production have changed places this time ( presumably so that Miss Aspassia Papathanassiou could appear in both plays , as Clytemnestra and her ghost ) . Miss Thalia Kalliga &apos;s Electra is as impressive as her Clytemnestra , but inevitably Miss Papathanassiou with her incandescent pallor and the vibrant intensity of her stage presence seizes our attention every moment she is on the scene and it is a measure of her power over the whole production that when the curtain finally descends it is not the harmony of the close , but Clytemnestra &apos;s ghost crying in the night for vengeance , which remains most potently in our minds . fine exhibition of sporting prints . age of the coloured aquatint . the exhibition of English and French engravings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Messrs Agnew &apos;s Galleries , 43 , Old Bond Street , until July 8 , is a pleasant reminder mainly of the age of the coloured aquatint though it includes also examples of the delicate French line-engravings after Moreau le Jeune from le monument de costume . it represents in impressions of excellent quality such famous prints as Debucourt &apos;s la promenade publique of 1792 , the view of Westminster Hall and Abbey engraved by D Havell after J Glendall , and the now rare coaching subjects of James Pollard of which the royal mails preparing to start for the west of England , 1831 ( from the swan with two necks , Cheapside ) is a notable example . Joseph Farington gains from translation into aquatint in the plates from Boydell &apos;s history of the River Thames and some interesting views of early nineteenth century Greece include an aquatint of the Parthenon ( Dodwell-Bennett ) as it must have appeared shortly after Lord Elgin had removed the marbles . the sporting prints by Herring and Alken are good examples of an always popular genre . pictorial confections . closely alike in style , the pictures of Dietz Edzard and Suzanne Eisendieck may be suitably described as confections and the sugared quality the word implies pervades the current exhibition of their work at the Adams Gallery , 24 , Davis Street , W.1 , giving to views of Venice and Normandy a charm curiously remote from reality . the idyllic combination of figure and landscape in which these artists have specialized needs a sweet tooth of appreciation . the exhibition continues until June 30 . moral earnestness in ballet . the social and aesthetic climate of Soviet ballet is so different from our own that in considering Russian ballet today we start at a considerable disadvantage . the sense of moral earnestness , the view that art should be a guide and mentor for the people , which is the substructure of Soviet choreography , can produce effects which will strike us as naive or old-fashioned ; yet this would not perhaps be so important were it not for the fact that the use made of dance movement and of performers must necessarily reflect this same feeling . the choreographic manner - where the hero &apos;s leaps are an affirmation of faith , and the heroine , held aloft , is woman-kind as a triumphant inspiration and reward for the hero &apos;s endeavours - has an initial excitement which too often declines into dramatic clich&amp;eacute; to the detriment of our western enjoyment of the dancing as a stage spectacle . these are the very faults of the stone flower with which the Leningrad state Kirov ballet opened their season at Covent Garden last night . the plot tells of a stone-cutter , Danila , loving a young girl , Katerina , and dissatisfied with his art . his longing to create a perfect stone flower takes him to a magical cavern , presided over by the Mistress of the copper Mountain . there he learns the secrets of his craft , and there Katerina comes at last to fetch him away from the Mistress of the Mountain , who reluctantly lets him go . it is , baldly , an uneven work , but even in our limited experience of Soviet ballet , an interesting one , and an unusual departure from anything we have seen previously from Russia . gone is the realist d&amp;eacute;cor ; instead , a back drop rises to reveal the various changes for scenes which are otherwise played on a bare stage and with simple black wings . the choreography is the first major creation of the young Yuri Grigorovich , and it demonstrates a talent not as yet up to the demands of a large work . for Danila and Katerina he uses a free-flowering classicism , while for the Mistress of the Mountain he has devised a quasi-acrobatic style , sinuous , angular , and very brilliant . he is most successful in adapting folk-dancing for the chorus of peasants and gipsies , and he shows a remarkable gift for movement for a large corps , dazzling , intricate , and with a muscular brio that is enormously effective . but against this we have to set scenes for the corps de ballet of jewels that seem fidgety and sterile exercises in academic movement , lacking any originality . the three principals are admirable : as Danila , Mr Yuri Soloviev gives a tremendous performance ; he has a prodigious technique in leaps and turns , he is a fine partner , and conveys that sense of dramatic conviction that can disarm our criticism of a character that is not fully explored in the ballet . as Katerina and the Mistress of the Mountain Miss Alla Sizova and Miss Alla Osipenko are well contrasted , with Miss Sizova &apos;s warm lyrical style matched against the force and &amp;eacute;clat of Miss Osipenko . the company are seen best in the character dances ; as peasants and gypsies in a fair scene that inevitably recalls Petrushka they show just how much dramatic variety can be obtained from a superb corps . in the classical sequences we can only appreciate the difference that still exists between Leningrad and Moscow dancers ; here is a style that seems nearer our own , more reserved and less emotionally extreme than the Bolshoi . the Prokofiev score , magnificently handled by Mr Niazi , is adequate as ballet music , but a first hearing does not reveal it as of the standard of Romeo and Juliet , or even as appealing as Cinderella . wide colour on harpsichord . Miss Silvia Kind &apos;s recital . in spite of the harpsichord &apos;s popularity , true harpsichordists these days are very rare . Miss Silvia Kind , who played a varied and consistently interesting programme at Wigmore Hall last night , can hardly be considered one just yet . an attack of nerves in Bach &apos;s Italian concerto caused her to take the outer movements at perilously fast tempi with scarcely a thought for any detailed phrasing of their melodic lines ; if at the start of a recital this could be forgiven , her reliance on colour effects to underline the structure of the music - which unfortunately persisted throughout much of the remainder of it - most certainly could not . the expressive powers of a harpsichord are by no means directly proportionate to the number of registrations it possesses . in some seventeenth-century programme pieces by John Bull , Bernardo Pasquini and Alessandro Poglietti the employment of a wide variety of colour per se seemed appropriate enough ; in Mozart , however ( the Duport variations K.573 ) , such superficial treatment chopped up the music altogether too much . but the performance of Bach &apos;s D major toccata bwv 912 , with which Miss Kind ended her recital , combined some splendidly bold and free declamatory playing with keen perception of the work &apos;s continuity and nobility of outline . it suggested , in fact , that Miss Kind is a very much better harpsichordist than this recital as a whole revealed . unequal support for three authors . Webber-Douglas School : triple bill . thirteen second-year students appeared in last night &apos;s performance , and one &apos;s judgment of them might have been fairer , if the running order of the programme had been reversed . as it was , their failure to make the first two items work as play , was irritating , and caused one to undervalue even those pieces of acting which obviously had merit , such as those of Miss Jocelyn Carney in act 1 of the chalk garden and of all three players in a phoenix too frequent , Miss Amanda Reeves , Miss Sonia Hughes , and Mr Aart van Bergen . the cast of the third piece , the dark lady of the sonnets , did not reach a noticeably higher standard than that of Mr Christopher Fry &apos;s play , yet the former , consisting of Mr Gerald Curtis ( Shakespeare ) , Miss Gabrielle Griffin ( Queen Elizabeth 1 ) , Miss Hazel Prance and Mr Gilbert Sutherland , seemed to have no trouble in persuading us to take Shaw &apos;s 50-year-old plea for a national theatre in excellent part . the movement at the beginning when the Tudor beefeater made the same damning criticism of Shakespeare &apos;s play that people were still making of Shaw &apos;s plays in 1910 was such a delight that we were prepared from then onwards to be satisfied with everything . but to accept so much help from Shaw and themselves to give so little help to their other two authors , Miss Enid Bagnold and Mr Fry , looked like weakness in this student company . Zurich sees two contrasting versions of Dostoevsky &apos;s crime and punishment . from our special correspondent . two stage versions of Raskolnikoff have been presented here in Zurich during the June festival . Leopold Ahlsen &apos;s play was brought to the Schauspielhaus in the production of the Berlin Schlosspark-theater and Heinrich Sutermeister &apos;s opera is in the season &apos;s repertory of the Stadtheater . seen here on consecutive days these two adaptations of Dostoevsky &apos;s novel seem as different from each other - and in many ways from the book itself - as current opinions on crime and punishment are sometimes at variance . Mr Ahlsen &apos;s play might well have been given the alternative title of crime and detection , and derives much of its dramatic impetus from being a good thriller . but it goes deeper than that , too . it is a fascinating psychological study and draws some attention to the political , metaphysical , religious , and moral aspects of the subject under discussion , namely , the taking of human life . 