Word: lps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Joseph Szigeti (Columbia, 6 LPs, $23.98). Now 80 and living in Switzerland, Szigeti at his peak was that rare performer fully entitled to be called both a musicians' musician and a violinists' violinist. With Szigeti, the usual egoistic trappings of the virtuoso life took second place to a kind of earthy piety based on prodigious musical insight and a troth-like pledge between him and the composer. Here are some of his finest concerto recordings-notably the Brahms with Hamilton Harty (1928), the Beethoven with Bruno Walter (1932), the Prokofiev First, Mozart Fourth and the Mendelssohn with...
Rossini, La Cenerentola (Teresa Berganza, Luigi Alva, Renato Capecchi, Paolo Montarsolo, London Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Opera Chorus, Claudio Abbado conducting; Deutsche Grammophon, 3 LPs, $20.94). Despite the greater popularity of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, this is actually the composer's comic masterpiece, a work in which the stuff of childish fantasy is transformed breathtakingly into the best kind of adult fun and games. In the title role, Spain's Teresa Berganza sings with a bravura coloratura style that (among mezzos) only Marilyn Home might match. Conductor Claudio Abbado not only has opted for a newly cleaned-up version...
Mozart, Violin Concertos Nos. 1 to 5, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364 (and other works) (David Oistrakh, soloist and conductor, Berlin Philharmonic; Angel, 4 LPs, $23.92). The riddle of the Sphinx is nothing compared with the mystery of Mozart interpretation. How else explain the existence of so many otherwise great men of music (Horowitz, Stokowski, to name but two) among the ranks of failed Mozarteans? David Oistrakh is emphatically not one of them. His playing (that curvaceous tone especially) has a touch of the romantic, but not enough to tarnish the piquant bloom of youth that imbues...
Beethoven, The Five Cello and Piano Sonatas (Cellist Pierre Fournier, Pianist Artur Schnabel; Seraphim, 2 LPs, $5.96). Whether darkly probing his psyche or demonstrating sheer joy, Beethoven was a composer who believed that music should be dramatic and expressive. So, fortunately, do Fournier and Schnabel, in this historic collaboration dating from 1948, now issued in its entirety for the first time on an American LP. It is hereby recommended as an antidote for today's "cool" and bloodless school of Beethoven interpretation...
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (Tenor Jon Vickers, Soprano Helga Dernesch, Soprano Christa Ludwig, Baritone Walter Berry, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting; Angel, 5 LPs, $29.90). What a cast of performers! What a disappointment! Given Karajan's past flair for Wagner, not to mention stalwart Tenor Vickers as Tristan, this could well have been, the stereo statement of Wagner's endless paean to adultery. Instead, it is merely a smooth, workmanlike job, hampered by Dernesch's inability to make Isolde alive enough so that her death is significant. The record is also marred by the cavernous, "first...