For the first few minutes of Orchestra Rehearsal it is as if the early, good Fellini had miraculously risen from the ashes of his self-indulgent, self-parodying, overblown and vacuous later works. A decrepit music copyist sets the scene for a symphonic rehearsal in a trecento oratory where several buried popes and bishops seem somehow to make the acoustics perfect, and where a TV crew is about to film the rehearsal. The atmosphere is vintage Fellini: the old fellow, an amateur actor and typical Fellinian oddball, is comfortably crotchety and eccentrically sensible; the oratory looks austerely authentic….

The films's interest … dies quickly, because the point—the contrast between an orderly but dead past and rebellious contemporary confusion—is soon made unpleasantly obvious. As each arriving musician praises or patronizes his particular instrument to the invisible television interviewer (Fellini's voice), and does so in blatantly anthropomorphic terms; as, moreover, each player speaks with a different regional or snobbish accent, the suggestiveness of symbolism promptly yields to the predictability and constriction of allegory. To cap it all, the conductor is a dictatorial German, and the union delegate who causes considerable mischief, a Sardinian-like Berlinguer, the president of Italy's CP.

When the orchestra members hurl mud or excrement at the portraits of the great classical composers, clamor for the death of the conductor, and set up a giant metronome in his place, then proceed to smash everything, we are submerged in Fellini's bitterness about present-day Italy after the Moro slaying, and though we may share his disgust, we yearn for a form more dramatic than the parable…. The old order is gone, and every new system leads to one kind of tyranny or another, Fellini is saying. Agreed; I just wish he were not saying it quite so schematically.