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Debussy: Jeux; Debussy-Ravel: Danse. Dukas: La Peri. L'Orch. de la Suisse Ro-mande, Ansermet. - London CS 6043 (stereo)

The Debussy side of this disc is a top stereo prize, to please anybody and everybody; the Dukas side is interesting, if of lesser impact all around.

"Jeux" - Games - is a remarkably little known Debussy ballet score, the last orchestral work he composed, dating from 1912, well after the more familiar pieces. It is accordingly more concentrated, more modern, terse, and even better for hi-fi than the earlier scores. In this really wonderful stereo recording and performance the late-Debussy idiom, the colorful, bittersweet orchestration, are projected with no less than thrilling effect, for me anyhow. I am sure that hi-fi lovers without a trace of Debussy in their systems will enjoy it just as much. It's just a d - good record for listening.

"La Peri," the last work of Dukas, is mainly novel in that it isn't the "Sorcerer's Apprentice," the Dukas piece we always hear. It isn't as good, either, and it is much more longwinded, less original. A nice and tuneful chromatic score, not too far removed from the Scheherezade sort of music (and Dukas manages to steal a couple of Rimsky-Korsakoff themes, without noticing it), but it doesn't compare with the Debussy.

The third piece is a familiar early piano piece of Debussy, as orchestrated many years later by Ravel. A pleasant trifle, to fill out a side - and it's a pleasure, at least, to see a stereo side actually filled out, for once.

Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite. Phila. Orch., Ormandy. Columbia MS 6003 (stereo)
This piece is generally deplored by lovers of classical music, but few musicians would deny the extraordinary effect of the instrumentation. The tunes are trite, the effects second hand, the romance forced, the style out of anybody and everybody familiar - but nevertheless, the piece is outstanding as an orchestral tour de force.

Stereo, by virtue of its way with the orchestra, makes a new wonder out the old war-horse. I expected to be bored, I listened with astonishment. Never has stereo's power to space out the insides of a piece of music been more nicely demonstrated.

Of course - you hear the same details in the mono version. But you don't notice them. The subtle differences in source, in hall reflection, scarcely important in themselves, still add up to a transparency and rhythmic polyphony that has never been achieved on any standard mono recording of the music and never will. (By polyphony I simply mean that in stereo you can sense the several strands of thought going on at once, in different parts of the orchestra, each made clear and separate from the others, yet simultaneous with them. Mono recording takes away the separateness
of impact.)

Mendelssohn: Italian and Reformation Symphonies. Boston Symphony, Munch. - RCA VICTOR LSC 2221 (stereo)
In this one - particularly in the "Reformation" Symphony- - it is the impact of an intense Romanticism, a Romantic ecstasy, that hits you via the immediacy of the stereo medium. I was immensely impressed by the "Reformation" (it is Symphony No. 5) in this playing though, generally, I find Munch on the chilly side in Romantic music. Maybe it's just the RCA Victor punch here - it's a splendid recording.
The "Italian," for some reason, doesn't hit me as hard. I suspect that the difference is with both me and the orchestra : the music is overly familiar and, by now, a bit stale and it's not the sort that can be played without the right enthusiasm and freshness.

Dvorak: Serenade in D Minor, Op. 44.
Boston Woodwind Ensemble, plus cello and double bass.
Boston BST 1004 (stereo)
And here, the stereo impact is largely in the sound of the hall. The smallish cluster of instruments is not importantly aided by the left-right distribution ; it isn't that vital. But what does come through in stereo is the strong feeling that these players are directly before you, on a large stage within a large and resonant hall. That in itself, along with fine playing of a top-rank Romantic serenade (one of the best of all the Dvorak works), makes for good stereo listening.

As in so many other new stereos, this one is considerably shorter than the mono version of the same, which includes other music as well. Boston follows the now-familiar practice of spreading out over three or four stereo discs the contents of maybe two monos. Necessary, and worthwhile in the result - well-cut stereo grooves. (But I wish the price per disc would be equalized. To pay more for less hurts too much. If the stereo records are shorter, it's enough to have to pay the full mono price, let alone 20 per cent more.)

Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikado. D'Oyly Carte Opera Co., New Symphony Orch., Godfrey. London OSA 1201 (2) (stereo)

This is it! It didn't take me five minutes of listening to this new recording to decide that there still is only one way to do "G & S" and that is the D'Oyly Carte way. I didn't even bother to get out the recent Angel stereo recording of the same with the famed Glynde-bourne opera company - it just isn't in the running.

I suppose there are plenty of G & S fans who will, as always, deplore these new fangled Mikados, one and all, in favor of the classic recorded version on 78, done in the late Twenties and beloved for two generations. Maybe so, maybe so. (In fact, I'm going to have to look that old set up for a direct comparison, one of these days, out of sheer curiosity.) But time flies ana it's now thirty years later - and we still have D'Oyly Carte and the authentic tradition, as we did in 1928, some forty-odd years after the original. What more can you ask?

D'Oyly Carte, if you didn't know, was the original Gilbert and Sullivan company, perpetuated (like an eternal "South Pacific" or "My Fair Lady") from one generation to another, always in the family, carrying on the traditions and - incidentally - owning the still-unexpired copyrights; all other versions are unauthentic, and all other versions (excluding a great many worthy amateur productions) sound unauthentic, too. They ring false.

This stereo Mikado may not boast the most perfect group of D'Oyly Carte singers ever, but by golly, the old familiar types are on hand, mostly to perfection. The crusty, acid-voiced baritone High Executioner (he appears in some form in every one of the operas), the gravelly contralto, Katisha, the sweet young things (three little maids), all a-twitter and ever so British, the ponderous basso and the ecstatic tenor (always a bit strained in voice and never quite altogether in tune) - every familiar sound is here. Even the chorus, plus one of the best G & S orchestras ever but still under the same Isidore Godfrey.

What never fails to astonish me is the verve and enthusiasm that this company is able to summon up, year after year, decade after decade, lifetime in and lifetime out. Don't tell me the British aren't the most tradition-minded souls in the world! Personally, I'd go nuts singing nothing but G & S for ever and anon, but I certainly don't go nuts listening to these singers.

The stereo is excellent, and adds a wonderful sense of immediacy and presence to the production, without in the least posing problems of artificiality or falseness in the spatial sense. The soloists are placed exactly right, not too near, not too far, and they move just enough so that they aren't rooted to pedestals ; you'll never worry an instant about their visual whereabouts. The chorus is in back, precisely where is should be (but not too far) and the orchestra - well, it's everywhere and very much in place musically.

I'm not even listing the Glyndebourne production here. It is wrong, wrong, so very wrong - and Glyndebourne is one of the finest "real" opera companies in the world. But this G & S, you see, isn't real opera ; it's a stylized show type of its own, satirizing opera and plenty else, but never, never sounding like actual opera, never competing with actual opera either. Glyndebourne's Angel performance (a) sounds like real opera and (b) plays down to G & S, as though the ghosts of Mozart and Verdi and Rossini were on hand to deplore. Bad, You have to have faith in G & S to sing it right.

Note - there are other G & S stereo albums from D'Oyly Carte too ; they'll all be done again, most likely.

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons.
(a) I Solisti di Zagreb, Janigro. Vanguard BGS 5001 (stereo)
(b) Stuttgart Chamber Orch., Munchinger. London CS 6044 (stereo)

These are two heartwarming recordings of this set of Italian
concertos that has risen, since the war, from complete obscurity to be one of the favorite 18th century works. Both versions represent about the best playing of this sort of music available from their respective areas - Germany and the Adriatic Sea.

Both are excellent stereos, technically and for the music itself. Both are "authentic" in their approach and in their complement of performers, a small string group with harpsichord plus two or three solo violins.

There have been horribly distorted performances of this music, and not infrequently either - a recording by the late Guido Cantelli comes to my mind as perhaps the most distressing of all. There have been stodgy, musi-cological-style playings, romantic, overblown versions.
Our own symphony orchestras are inherently incapable of making sense of this kind of music - though they have tried. But here, at last, we have it as right as Mozart, and the variations from one to the other of these two recordings are what may be called, at last, legitimate within the style and period of the music.

Vanguard's recording is the lightest, the airiest, the most electrical. It has a cat-like quality - steel-springed, but beautifully under control, that is of the best in the Italian school of present-day string playing. (Zagreb is evidently more Italian than Germanic in its musical affiliations.) The soloists are sensationally good in their parts (one is a principal solo, the others more or less secondary.) The display of the successive seasons lulls, crackles, roars, bristles, sleeps, all within the strict 18th-century framewTork of musical expression.

London's from Stuttgart, within the same general tradition, is sweet and German. The tempi are slower, the music fuller, softer, rounder, the voltage generally lower but the amperage plenty ample. German Baroque playing (this is nominally what is called Baroque music) can be stuffy, heavy, plodding ; it isn't, here - far from it. If you play this hard on the heels of the Vanguard disc it will seem a bit heavy-handed for about three minutes. Then, as you adjust to the feel of the performance, the heaviness will vanish.

An interesting stereo point, concerning both discs : these are of the 18th-century concerto type where the solo or solo group is contrasted and complementary to the larger "tutti" body of strings but not singled out in the later super-virtuoso fashion. The engineers accordingly have been able to place these solo riddles in a much truer and more natural perspective than is possible when the concerto soloist is a big name writh all the trimmings and plenty to show off about. Big-name solos must sound big - and they do, alas.

Most of the big concertos are now subject to stereo elephantiasis of the solo. I don't like it and doubt if I ever will - for it is not a necessity in stereo, as it was in mono recording. I hate to hear huge fiddles playing close-up in front of vast, distant orchestras ; I dislike a ponderous piano that floats in midair before your very nose, I find more and more that stereo solos - all solos - -are best when taken from a more concert-like position and in a concert-style volume balance. But, unfortunately, the practice of solo magnification isn't going to die easily.

And so there's nothing like the "little" solo, the semi-soloist, for good stereo ! If his name is anonymous, or set, figuratively, in medium-sized letters, not big ones then he gets ideal stereo treatment from our present-day engineers. Try either of these recordings and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantistique. Cento Soli Orch. of Paris, Fourestier.
Omega Disk OSL 9 (stereo) Stravinsky: Petrouchka. Cento Soli Orch., Albert. Omega Disk OSL 8 (stereo)

Here is an unexpected and quite startling new stereo series, in two examples, launched out of the blue by a company that hasn't to my knowledge had its nose in the classical disc catalogue before. The discs are, surprisingly, top rate. The sound is terrific and so is the engineering; the performances, by an orchestra that I hadn't heard mentioned before, are fresh, full of life, if (like many a
French performance) somewhat on the erratic side.

The best of the two sonic ally is the Stravinsky - mainly thanks to Stravinsky himself, who is beautifully served by this opulent, full-bodied two-channel (?) stereo taping. One of the interesting things our ears begin to learn in respect to stereo these days is the quite different effect of two-channel and three-channel originals. Not all are clearly to be heard one wTay or the other - but a recording such as this one seems clearly two-sided, the emphasis on the right and left areas, wTith a relatively mild sense of straight-ahead middle.

I do not by this mean that there is a "hole in the middle" by any means ! (Now that my speaker phasing is usually right, I don't believe in holes in the middle any more. They really don't exist.)

There is simply a feeling of "two-ness" here, an attraction for the ear towards both sides, which spread out beautifully to overlap in the middle and so complete the picture. This is superb for the Stravinsky score, which never got such a fabulously clinical inside exposition. The endless details of orchestration are so clearly, startlingly brought out that you will be fascinated for hours, given a bit of musical curiosity.

The famous Berlioz symphony, a bit less striking as stereo, is the better performance - it is a traditional favorite of French musicians, who put into it all the accuracy, the electrical quality, that it must have. (The Stravinsky performance is conducted by a young German conductor ; he makes it sound German, wTith unusually slow tempi, a rather heavy quality. Interesting, even so.)
My Congrats to Omega for a splendid technical job on both discs.

Berlioz: Corsair, Beatrice and Benedict, King Lear, Rob Roy Overtures. Philharmonic Promenade Orch., Boult.
Westminster WST 14009 (stereo)

Sometimes the best virtue of stereo is moderation - and it's worth money. You'll pay for it in this one, with good musical benefits.

What I mean is, that for much music, especially for the classical orchestra of the middle and late 19th century, a general overall sound picture is far more important than a clinical, close-up, spread-out look at details. In modern music from, let's say, 1890 on, the orchestra is minutely subdivided with a wealth of coloristic detail work. The earlier orchestra - especially Berlioz - has the detail work too, but it is definitely secondary to larger, over-all musical statements that must be heard full-size and as a whole. Too much stereo effect and you lose out in musical sense.

With which introduction I proceed to say that the relatively mild stereo of this recording is exactly right for the music. I've switched to my "mono" position (paralleling the cartridge leads) to note that superficially there isn't any enormous differences but that the small difference which is evident is good to the music.

The four Berlioz overtures here include an almost unknown one, Rob Roy, an early work that gets its first recording here. You'll enjoy it, if only for the main theme which, says my curious ear, is no less than the familiar Scotch tune "Scots wha hae for Wallace bled" - is that the right title? (Westminster's an-notator doesn't seem to have heard it.) The British performance is impeccably musical, accurate, and on the whole, very British. Doesn't do this slightly overdramatic French music a bit of harm !

(N.B. There's a companion overture disc with four more Berlioz overtures on it, WST 14008.)

Prokofieff: Peter and the Wolf. Garry Moore; Philharmonic Symphony of London, Rodzinski.
Saint-Saens: Carnival of the Animals. Garry Moore, narr. J. and G. Dichler, pianists, Vienna State Opera Orch., Scherchen; zoo sounds.
Westminster WST 14040 (stereo)

This is an odd one! It's a composite, of course, mixing Vienna, London, America, and the Bronx zoo for a grand stereo pastiche that has me only partly impressed - but Impressed, even so.

Take "Peter" first. Garry Moore tries hard to be the average Joe, avoiding the archness of most tellers of the Peter story in favor of an almost hard-boiled approach. Pretty sad, I'd say. "Peter" isn't that kind of piece. As for the stereo here - if there is any, then I can't hear it. Sure, there's virtue in moderation, as I have said already ; but when moderation moderates to the vanishing point . . . anyhow, the performance itself - the orchestra - is nicely done. It's probably the same one Issued in various other Westminster "Peter" formats, including one (mono) without any voice at all.

The "Carnival" is quite a proposition. It has been out before in mono form - -but here, the actual animals are claimed to be recorded in stereo at the Bronx zoo ! Well, maybe so, but if I am hardly aware of ducks to the right and wolves to the left, at least the animal sounds are real and out of live animals. Oddly enough, too, they go quite well with the Saint-Saens music, which is decidedly not what I had expected. The alternation of living animals and musical animals proceeds smoothly via tape editing and the total effect is quite instructive.

Here, the music is plenty stereo at least as far as the two solo pianos are concerned ; one is on each side of you and the contrast is musically interesting. The orchestra isn't spread out much but it doesn't matter. Nice playing, and Garry Moore is better here than in "Peter" even if the "verses" he recites are pale imitations of the clever set done by Ogden Nash (on an early Columbia LP).

Prokofieff: Peter and the Wolf; Lieutenant Kije Suite. Boris Karloff; Vienna State Opera Orch., Rossi. - Vanguard VSD 2010 (stereo)

Toss this one in the pot too - it makes a nice contrast to the Westminster "Peter". Where Garry Moore tries hard to be butch,
Boris Karloff goes back to the real fairy-tale tradition, booming out the story in rich, sepulchral tones, his voice surrounded by a huge space that is even bigger than the large musical hall in which the orchestra plays. (The two were done separately, of course).

The performance of the music goes perfectly with the Karloff approach ; it makes much of every detail, in a slow and impressive way ; the wolf is positively frightening, grandfather hobbles slowly and implacably with Peter in tow, the cat is slimier than ever. (Well, you find a better word.)

Old "Peter" fans will find this recording a heartening throw-back to the first "Peter" of all, on RCA Victor 78's with the Boston Symphony and Richard Hale, who spoke at stage distance in what now turns out to have been a thoroughly Karloffian manner.

Beethoven: Symphony #6 ("Pastorale"). - Columbia Symphony, Bruno Walter. - Columbia MS 6012 (stereo)

I suppose I've sampled a dozen versions of the Beethoven Sixth, the one with the thunderstorm and the bird songs, during this last year or so ; not a one of them was able to get through to the music as it ought to be - and has been, in the past, under such leaders as Walter himself and Arturo Toscanini. (He did an early Sixth on 787s that has never been beat.)

Old Bruno Walter, as far as I'm concerned, has hit this particular jackpot on the nose. I haven't compared him to Toscanini (or to all the others) nor even to himself as of earlier recordings. Not important. This version, in stereo, is miraculously right where the others, one after the next, failed to get into the spirit, failed to make the tricky music and the even-trickier pastoral symbolism sound convincing, in performance.

No use saying more, except that I find the Columbia stereo just about ideal for the music. It could be done differently, of course. But this is one excellent way to take down the Sixth - and with such a performance to work upon, there wasn't much chance of its misfiring.
(You can have it in mono, but don't if you can help it.)

Mendelssohn: String Quartet in E Flat. Glinka: String Quartet in F. Westwood String Quartet. Stereo Records S 7006

I have postponed this record for months because when I first tried it the sound was so dreadful that I decided immediately it couldn't be that bad - it must be my stereo equipment.

Well, it isn't that bad - but it isn't good sound, either. Instructively enough, I was also sent the mono version of the record (different brand on this one, though the cover is the same) and I quickly found that part of the trouble is in the original tape - or perhaps in the music itself - a thin, wiry, unpleasant string sound, in both mono and stereo versions. It could be the quartet itself and/or the particular acoustics and mike placement chosen ; in any case, I have never heard anything quite like this unpleasantness and I am not enthusiastic about it.

In addition, the performances are dominated by a very wobbly first violin, Louis Kaufman. No amount of engineering can repair that. The playing ensemble is poor, though the spirit is good.

Finally, the stereo record is distorted, and no doubt about it. Not the horrible distortion that I seemed to hear on my earlier stereo playing equipment but, rather, a mild, annoying, slight distortion that gets worse in the inner grooves, as might be expected. I am sure that this distortion will show up variably according to the cartridge used ; with the best and most compliant cartridges it should be slight enough not to interfere with your musical listening.

I mention this record in detail mainly as an interesting example of the problems in current record listening. We always blame the record, but more often we should look out for our own equipment, in every aspect. Without the slightest doubt, for instance, a brilliant tweeter system and/or a very live room will exaggerate this slight distortion to the utterly impossible stage, whatever the cartridge.

Without a doubt, too, a cheap phonograph of the sort that mercifully suppresses the highs won't even show it up at all.

One reviewer of this disc, in another magazine, praised it to the skies as a fine stereo recording. Wonder what equipment he used?

By the way, the two quartets are interesting music, one of them a pleasing bit by the pioneer Russian composer, the other a youthful and surprisingly mature quartet by Mendelssohn aged 14. The Society for Forgotten Music, which sponsors this series, did a good job on the musical choice of material.

Gluck: Alceste. Flagstad, Jobin, etc., Geraint Jones Orch. and Singers.- London OSA 1403 (4 stereo)

This is the stately opera in which Flagstad made her "final" appearance on the opera stage in New York, a good many years ago ; I saw and heard her and won't soon forget the occasion, especially the moment when the great singer, wrapped in her long white robes and looking as large as the statue of liberty, tripped and almost fell down a stage mountain. The audience positively gasped, for Flagstad is and was a monumental singer par excellence.

The monumentality is still there, and so is the fine musicianship. Whether you enjoy this recording or not depends mostly on a rather tricky ratio, between your appreciation of the high plane of tragedy on which she projects the opera - she can't be beat on that score - and your distress at those inevitable high notes which the ageing lady squawks most painfully. (Lesser singers merely sing flat ; Flagstad always hits the pitch exactly, even if it nearly strangles her.) If you can forgive her these, and if you are aware of the real greatness of her lofty concept, this is for you. It's not for most listeners, and that includes many who would prefer a more "authentic" and less grandly Romantic interpretation.

Opera fans should keep one important fact in mind here - this is not the usual French version of the opera but the original Italian version, written in Vienna before Gluck moved to Paris and the protection of Marie Antoinette (before she lost her head, of course). The older Italian opera style was lofty, serious, restrained - -restricted, perhaps. The new Gluck reforms, applied to his own operas in their French revamping, allowed for more freedom, a more personal and expressive style. Flagstad is entirely right (and with her the rest of this cast) in pursuing the older, lofty ideal here. Interesting.

Liszt: Totentanz; Malediction. Alfred Bren-del, piano, Vienna Symphony, Gielen.
Stereo Vox ST-PL 11.030 (The same, plus) Mephisto Waltz jt\, Czardas Macabre, Die Traurige Gondel, Unstern. Vox PL 11.030

These two Vox discs share a common catalogue number and a common cover - an uncommonly good looking one, by the way. They also share in common two largeish and unusual Liszt pieces for piano and orchestra, as above. I found these two works very interesting. Liszt, the ultra-arch-Romantic, is beginning to make a serious comeback these days, not only in his more familiar big pieces but in a large number of works that for a couple of generations have been pretty much put aside as inferior, longwinded, bombastic, overblown, and what have you.

They are bombastic, overblown, noisy, blatant, no doubt about it. Yet under all his noise and showmanship (which was very much what people enjoyed in those days), Liszt was always a strong musician and basically a good composer. Also a very modern one in ways that are only now beginning to emerge - he wrote a sort of semi-atonal chromatic music that actually was much nearer to modern ways of musical thinking that Wagner's more famous endlessly shifting harmonies. Liszt used his half-tone, chromatic melodies, his restless harmonies, in a tight, nervous, intense fashion - beneath the bombast - that listeners of his time could not appreciate in the terms we do today. These things can be heard as well in his lesser, un-(Continued on page 67)