Word: conductor
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Haydn: The Seasons (Soprano Ileana Cotrubas, Tenor Werner Krenn, Bass Hans Sotin, Brighton Festival Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Antal Dorati conductor, London; 3 LPs). This is Haydn's other major oratorio, structurally less cohesive and dramatically less powerful than The Creation, but a work in which the aging composer set out to demonstrate all that he could do in a wide range of styles and forms. In other words, a compendium of glories. The text, from James Thomson's panoramic poem written in 1730, inspires passages of musical landscape painting, evocations of the hunt, human scenes of yeomen...
Krzysztof Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high...
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Mussorgsky-Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition. Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite, 1919 version (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Now that Muti has been appointed to succeed Eugene Ormandy in 1980, listeners will turn to these, his first discs with the orchestra, to see what kind of new leader the Philadelphia has. They will find few conclusive answers. These are unexceptionable performances, clean and firm-if anything, too firm in the emphatic attack in the Beethoven and the clipped chords of the Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. What is missing...
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...
Benjamin Britten: Spring Symphony (Soprano Sheila Armstrong, Mezzo Janet Baker, Tenor Robert Tear, St. Clement Danes School Boys' Choir, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Andre Previn conductor, Angel). Berlin born and Hollywood bred, Previn continues to show a surprising flair for English music. Here he leads a zesty performance of a piece that, like so much English music, makes a strength of its provincialism: it has medieval and folk echoes, strikes a resolutely winsome and pastoral note, and is steeped in native literature (with settings of verses by poets from Herrick and Blake to Auden). Britten composed it when...