Word: lps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...many Angel LPs attest (notably the Bach Flute Sonatas with Harpsichordist George Malcolm), Shaffer is thoroughly at home in the recording studio. "Making a recording is like taking your stage makeup off," she says. "For example, the same tempi that work well before an audience tend to sound too slow coming from a disk. The same is true of dynamics. You can't be as loud, and you can't be as soft." Wherever she is playing, Shaffer tries to preserve the feeling that she is singing instead of merely blowing. That helps explain why she watches...
BERLIOZ: BENVENUTO CELLINI (Philips, 4 LPs). Berlioz's first opera is deeply poetic, grandly exuberant and stunningly performed under Conductor Colin Davis...
SCHOENBERG, BERG, WEBERN: COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS (DG, 5 LPs). A landmark of recorded chamber music by the La Salle Quartet...
Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (assorted soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting; Seraphim, 19 LPs, $53.98). With Beethoven and Brahms, Furtwängler could be infuriatingly eccentric. When he was conducting Wagner, though, his stately, expansive, analytic style produced performances that were ingeniously congruent with the composer's convoluted purpose. Drawn from a 1953 series of radio broadcasts from Rome in mono sound that ranges from only dim to adequate, this is a Ring that every Wagnerian will at least want to hear, and probably own as a low-priced...
...Anna Russell Album (Columbia, 2 LPs, $6.98). In case of a Christmas overdose of Wagner, try this chaser concocted by the crown princess of musical parody. As Miss Russell plays the piano and sings, her hilarious analysis of the Ring is based on the reasonable premise that the way to solve the crime (operatic especially) is to learn the motif. "The scene opens," she chirps, "in the River Rhine. IN IT!" The Rhine Maidens? "A sort of aquatic Andrew Sisters." Wotan? "The head god, and a crashing bore, too." The incestuous relationship between Sigmund and Sieglinde? "That...