Critics' Voices

By Compiled by Andrea Sachs

MUSIC

CHARLES MINGUS: EPITAPH (Columbia). Jazz, in today's approved jargon, is called Afro-American classical music. No work has better claim to that description than Epitaph, a monumental composition (more than two hours long) by the protean jazz bassist who died in 1979. Shifting from blues to Ellington-like mood pieces to cacophonous yawps, the work is scored for a 30- piece band. It was performed once in Mingus' lifetime, haphazardly. This live recording comes from Epitaph's real world premiere, at New York City's Lincoln Center last June. Composer and jazz historian Gunther Schuller led an all-star cast that included six musicians Mingus originally chose to play the work. The vivid result resembles its creator: difficult but dazzling.

VLADIMIR HOROWITZ: RECORDINGS 1930-1951 (Angel/EMI). This is the three-disc set to which posterity will turn to rediscover Horowitz's genius. In much of his later recording, musical lines are twisted into pretzels and strewn with the salt of neurotic fussiness. Here, both in large-scale major works (Liszt's Sonata in B minor) and smaller pieces (Chopin's mazurkas), the phenomenal technique and unmistakable sonority serve the music, rather than the other way around.

FLEETWOOD MAC: BEHIND THE MASK (Warner Bros.). Come with us now back to that distant time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and supergroups ruled the charts. Fleetwood Mac's first album in three years, and its first without Lindsey Buckingham, is an easy-to-take, if occasionally lumbering, excursion, with some sprightly love songs by mainstays Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks.

MOVIES

MIAMI BLUES. Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh are two smart, engaging actors, and they work beautifully as mismatched souls in the down-market world of Miami vice. Writer-director George Armitage illuminates this rogue comedy with stylish fun and splashy violence. A definite don't miss.

MONSIEUR HIRE. In rank solitude, a strange man (Michel Blanc) watches a pretty woman (Sandrine Bonnaire), and someone has murder in mind. From the Georges Simenon novel, French filmmaker Patrice Leconte spins a handsome web of obsession, betrayal and death. Blanc is spookily splendid as the pathetic voyeur.

TELEVISION

BREWSTER PLACE (ABC, debuting May 1, 9:30 p.m. EDT). Oprah Winfrey, a bit slimmer but just as soulful, reprises her starring role as Mattie in a weekly series based on her hit mini-series about women in an inner-city black neighborhood.

ARCHIE: TO RIVERDALE AND BACK AGAIN (NBC, May 6, 9 p.m. EDT). The comic-book teenagers, grown to thirtysomething age, come to TV in a two-hour movie. Archie is now a lawyer, Veronica a divorcee and Jughead a psychiatrist. Hmmm, maybe we liked them better as kids.

SKYSCRAPER (PBS, debuting May 7, 8 p.m. on most stations). The building of Manhattan's 47-story Worldwide Plaza is chronicled in five weekly episodes.

ETC.

SIEGFRIED AND ROY AT THE MIRAGE IN LAS VEGAS. If the flame-spewing volcano, the fish-filled tanks and the Polynesian-style gaming tables fail to bedazzle you, take in the hottest show on the Strip. Illusion prevails as a five-ton elephant disappears, Royal White tigers strut their stuff and glitzy dancing girls in armor play with a fire-breathing dragon.

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY. This company's 35th anniversary New York season celebrates the vitality of America's best modern ensemble. In the repertory are two new works, including the full-length Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun. And Taylor's dancers really can fly. Through May 13.

TULIP TIME '90, HOLLAND, MICH. This bud's for you. Tiptoe through eight miles of glorious blossoms at this annual Dutch jamboree that features 1,400 costumed klompen dancers, windmills, parades and literally millions of tulips. May 14 to May 19.

THEATER

TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS. If not the best new play of recent years, surely this is the most imaginative. Constance Congdon's brilliant off-Broadway script wryly deflects the story of a man with Alzheimer's disease into a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space.

SOME AMERICANS ABROAD. Hard as it is to imagine why anyone thought the pretensions and crotchets of some second-rate college professors on tour in England would make a play, it's harder still to comprehend why the deadly dull result is transferring to Broadway. It is a pallid apery of the academic comedies that the English, frankly, do better.

ELLIOT LOVES. Mike Nichols directing, Jules Feiffer writing and two-time Tony- winner Christine Baranski acting. How wrong can you go? This tale of mid- life crisis-cum-romance is at Chicago's Goodman, but can Broadway be far off?