Word: lps
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TCHAIKOVSKY: QUEEN OF SPADES (4 LPs; Melodiya/Angel). Because of the form's grandeur of aspiration and complexity of means, it is difficult to find a trivial opera. Yet Tchaikovsky managed to write a nearly flawless bit of trivia when he sat down to put silly music to a silly libretto about a fateful faro game and an old countess who is scared to death. That's right, scared to death by a mad gambler named Herman. In this recording, the role of the Countess is fairly well sung by Mezzo-Soprano Valentina Levko, and Herman is less well...
...Half of a new LP by the British duo Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde is devoted to The Progress Suite, a breezy pastiche that gibes at complacency and hypocrisy. The Asso ciation have begun to perform their liturgical-cum-martial Requiem for the Masses-included in one of their LPs -as a musical playlet, much as The Doors act out the visionary lyrics of The End and The Unknown Soldier. Newcomer Van Dyke Parks has cast his first album in the intricately woven format of a song cycle...
...however, his roles have been playing him, a familiar figure afflicted by gigantosis of the production and paralysis of the talent. Unlike his black-and-white delights of the '50s, this Technicolor collage substitutes fake eccentricity for true humor. One man wears a toupee that looks like melted LPs, another drinks nothing but brandy and egg whites-it looks as if someone had expectorated in it, says Sellers, in a fair sample of the film's scripted wit. And nearly everybody speaks in a pseudo-Castilian lisp that thoundth ath if the entire catht hath a thpeech defect...
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: COMPLETE PI ANO MUSIC (2 LPs; CBS). This set is worth acquiring as much for Stockhausen's notes on the album cover as for the music itself. Not that the composer writes revealingly about his art ("All the Piano Pieces V-X are characterized by groups of notes around nuclear notes, occurring before, with or after them."). Instead, he spends the space discussing the fascinating food his soloist, Aloys Kontarsky, consumed on the days when the album was being recorded. On the groaning board: jugged deer with Spdtzle; marrow consomme; steak Tartare; saltimbocca romana ("He sent...
DONIZETTI: L'ELISIR D'AMORE (2 LPs; Angel). The Elixir of Love is an 1832 comic opera that is a delightful collection of bouncy silliness couched in florid melody. Mirella Freni and Nicolai Gedda reproduce their entrancing Metropolitan Opera performances of two seasons ago, and they are complemented by the astonishing bass of Renato Capecchi, who combines unbelievable agility with mahogany-like richness in the role of a quack selling a love potion...