Word: lps
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...magnificence of the great King James Bible passages, and James Mason brings sonority and good sense to his declamation of Ecclesiastes (Caedmon), making the nameless narrator sound as contemporary as an existentialist in Paris, as ancient as a Pharisee. The sound track of the movie Oedipus Rex (Caedmon, 2 LPs), starring Douglas Campbell and Canada's Shakespearean Festival Players, transports listeners inside the towering walls of seven-gated Thebes for the bloody working out of man's greatest tragedy. Caedmon's The Red Badge of Courage fills the mind with battle flags, drum beats and the roll...
Hamlet (RCA Victor, 2 LPs). Sir John Gielgud, as a pensive, polished Dane, takes up arms against a sea of troubles with the able help of London's Old Vic Company, which is always impressive, if sometimes too elegant-sounding and static. In contrast to Sir Laurence Olivier's brasher, more youthful performance in 1948, Gielgud's version is resigned, traditional, declamatory; but it emerges as a memorable reading. All in all, from the creepy wind sighings and distant bells on the battlements of Elsinore in the first scene to the swordplay and slaughter of the last...
...listeners inclined to an earlier, lusher and more lyrical Richard Strauss. Angel has a superb new Rosenkavalier (on 4 LPs). Strauss's swirling, silvery tunes never sounded better. Herbert von Karajan, conducting London's Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, is pliant and powerful; Singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Teresa Stich-Randall and Christa Ludwig are uniformly excellent. They invest their climactic closing trio with even more than its usual aching grandeur, while Otto Edelmann's Baron Ochs combines authority with the required asininity...
Gluck: Alceste (Kirsten Flagstad, Raoul Jobin; Geraint Jones Orchestra and Singers conducted by Geraint Jones; London, 4 LPs). This version of the opera, which Composer Christoph Willibald Gluck predicted would "please in 200 years," is distinguished by some stunning choral singing and a sumptuous, apparently effortless performance by Soprano Flagstad, recorded last year when she was 61. Her role: the legendary Greek queen who goes to death in exchange for her husband's life-Apollo has him booked for liquidation-but eventually so moves the god that he revives her. French Canadian Tenor Jobin as the king sings powerfully...
...because her husband, like her father before him, began directing her musical career), Ruth Slenczynska is in the midst of a powerful comeback. After one false start, she returned to concertizing six years ago, has since played more than 600 concerts in Europe and the U.S., recently recorded three LPs for Decca. With a measure of success she has risen to a measure of compassion, and though in Forbidden Childhood she condemns her father (he died six years ago) for what he was, she forgives him for what he did. Perhaps through his own fault, her father's prophecy...