Record Reviews
by JOHN M. CONLY
Arne:Ode in Honor of Great Britain(“Rule, Britannia”) (Benjamin Britten conducting soloists, Aldeburgh Festival Orchestra and Chorus; London: 12″ LP). Almost everyone has heard “Rule, Britannia,” but few people know that it was originally the finale of a masque, Alfred, by Dr. Thomas Arne, produced in 1740. Here it is presented just as it thrilled the 1740 audience, with Peter Pears lustily singing the four verses against bright eighteenthcentury orchestration.
The rest of the disk offers two songs for royalty by Purcell and Arne and, on the reverse, a set of variations on an Elizabethan theme by six modern British composers, including Britten and Walton.
Bach: Suites No. 1 and No. 3 for Unaccompanied Cello (Antonio Janigro, cello; Westminster; 12″ LP). Skilled, vital, deeply sensitive performances, and some of the best cello sound anywhere. Complication; Columbia has fine versions of Suites 2 and 3 by Casals on a single disk; Period offers Starker in an equally good combination of 3 and 6.
Beethoven: Concerto No. 3 in C Minor (Rudolf Serkin, piano: Eugene Ormandy conducting Philadelphia Orchestra; Columbia: 12″ LP). Ormandy deepens as he ages, and Serkin remains a firm Beethovenian; so here is the best Third Concerto yet on microgroove. It could easily be a little more exciting, and the orchestra is better recorded than the piano; still, it’s good.
Chopin: Waltzes, Complete (Guiomar Novaes, piano; Vox: 12″ LP). The only substantial competition is from the late Dinu Lipatti, on Columbia. Novaes offers cleaner sound, one more waltz (No. 15, Op. posth.), and playing that is somewhat cooler and more measured than Lipatti’s. Chopin lovers had better hear both before buying.
Orff, Carl:Carmina Burana (Eugen Jochum conducting vocal soloists, Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Chorus; Docca: 12″ LP). Neither Thompson’s Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians nor the Oxford Companion to Music makes mention of Carl Orff, though he has been around for fifty-eight years, composing most of the time. However, when Deutsche Grammophon recorded his Carmina Burana, settings of authentic thirteenth-century strolling minstrel songs, it became at once their best seller. Score one for the public over the experts. (This is the same recording, incidentally.) Orff relies primarily on the primitive power of a good song, arranging it first in almost medieval simplicity and then beefing it up with exciting modern sound-effects. This formula could produce horrors, but in Orff’s hands it yields something really fascinating.
Wagner:Tristan and Isolde (Kirsten Flagstad, Ludwig Suthaus, Blanche Thebom, Dietrich FischerDiskau, Josef Greindl, other soloists; Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Covent Garden Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra; RCA Victor: five 12″ LPs in album, with libretto and commentary booklet). So far as this reviewer is concerned, here is the best operatic production on records, in all ways, without qualification. What trilling loss Flagstad may have incurred, through time, in physicalvocal powers is more than made up for in enhanced dramatic insight. Second credits must go to Furtwängler, for all-out aural exploitation of the score’s tremendous drama. Thebom is terrific; so is the brand-new Wagnerian, Fischer-Dieskau, as Kurwenal. And applause is due the HMV production men who have so magically combined perspective, impact, and intelligibility.
Full Dimensional Sound: A Study in High Fidelity (Excerpts from various FDS recordings; Capitol: 12″ LP in album, with explanatory essay by Charles Fowler). Four record companies — Urania, Westminster, RCA Victor, and Capitol — have put forth hi-fi “show-off” records, aimed in part at equipment dealers. Most consist mainly of excerpts from the makers’ own highest-fi disks. The Capitol is distinguished chiefly by the lucid, 2000-word explanation of wide-range sound-reproduction by Charles Fowler, executive editor of High Fidelity magazine — and by two startling bands of percussion-display by Hal Rees, chief percussionist of Twentieth Century-Fox Films.