Word: conductors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Davies' best defense to date is that very opera Taverner. The Royal Opera, now under the adventurous direction of Conductor Colin Davis, has given Taverner a handsome, stirring production that turns out to be one of the major events of London's operatic season...
Mozart: The Four Horn Concertos (Barry Tuckwell soloist, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Neville Marriner conductor; Angel, $5.98). As a solo instrument, the French horn lacks the innate variety of the piano or violin. That is a fact to be noted, then forgotten, while listening to this ravishing LP. Tuckwell plays the concertos as though they were as emphatically profound as anything Mozart ever wrote-which in the case of Nos. 3 (K. 447) and 4 (K. 495) is not too far from the truth...
Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364, Symphony No. 32 (Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Neville Marriner conductor; Argo, $5.95). Whether accompanying French-horn players (see above) or reinterpreting the Baroque repertory (the Bach orchestral Suites, the Handel Concerti Grossi, Op. 6), Neville Marriner is one of the best and busiest maestros on the London recording scene. His Mozart, an artful shading of sinew, sensuousness and sonority, is as good as anything he does. Indeed, Nachtmusik is the freshest, rosiest reading of that serenade to come along in years...
...Golden Spinning Wheel, Symphonic Variations (London Symphony Orchestra, Istvan Kertesz conductor; London, $5.98). Mention the words "tone poem" and the average post-Romantic music buff will think of Franz (Mazeppa) Liszt or Richard (Don Juan) Strauss, but rarely of Dvorak. A pity, since Dvorak, too, was a master of the genre. His subjects varied from The Watersprite to The Midday Witch, but he was never more magical than in The Golden Spinning Wheel. Recounting the fairy tale of a lovely spinning girl who pays somewhat gruesomely for a king's love, Dvorak filled his 26-minute score with bold...
Stravinsky: Petrushka (New York Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez conductor, Columbia, $5.98). Boulez's first recording with his new charges at the Philharmonic, and a sonic dazzler. When Stravinsky conducted this music, he deliberately gave it a kind of squeeze-box accordion sound, as though trying to match the marionette-stage milieu of the puppet hero. Boulez's performance is much broader in both aura and atmosphere, as if his touchstones were the gay, extroverted Shrovetide Fair scenes that open and close the work. The approaches are opposed but, happily, of equal validity...