Word: lps
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SCHUBERT: DIE WINTERREISE (Angel; 2 LPs). Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the greatest living lieder singer, sings some of Schubert's greatest lieder-a 24-part cycle about a rejected lover who sets out on a winter journey of despair, tantalized by everything he sees and dreams. These were Schubert's own favorites among his songs and were written just a year before his death at 31. Hermann Prey, a younger German baritone of growing renown, has also recorded Die Winterreise (Vox; 2 LPs). His voice is richer, but his interpretation is less subtle: while Fischer-Dieskau suffers a hundred...
...PURITANI (3 LPs; London) is the last and loveliest of Bellini's operas, a story about the Roundheads and the Stuarts in the days of Cromwell incongruously drenched in Italian melody and sunlit harmony. Only singers skilled in bel canto, such as Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, dare try it. In the new recording, Sutherland is the demented Elvira, and when she sings Vien, diletto in a deluge of perfectly matched and sparkling runs and trills, she embellishes even the embellishments. Maria Callas (on Angel's earlier version of I Puritani) has no such quicksilver in her voice...
...CRUCIBLE. (2 LPs; Composers Recordings Inc.). Based on Arthur Miller's play exposing some of the all too human motives behind the Puritan witch hunts, this 1962 Pulitzer prizewinner is the most successful to date of the operas subsidized by the Ford Foundation. Robert Ward's music is conservative by Schoenbergian standards, but dramatic, with syncopated, dissonant hymns and minor-keyed, folklike tunes suggesting the poisoned New England atmosphere. Most of the New York City Opera singers who premiered the work record it here with fine esprit de corps, led by Conductor Emerson Buckley...
MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic; Columbia, 2 LPs). Bernstein again shows his affinity for Mahler in this strong, youthful performance of the panoramic five-movement work sometimes called "The Giant." There are none of the songs that Mahler put in some of his other symphonies, but the instruments alone, as he used them, have eloquence to spare. Bernstein handles the long, playful scherzo with easy humor, changes moods in lightning flashes, and tears at the vitals of the dramatic sections. A milestone in the Mahler revival...
HAYDN: THE STURM UND DRANG SYMPHONIES (Vanguard). Haydn was a bit overwrought in the years when he composed these six pivotal symphonies, but one would never know it from these mellow recordings by Antonio Janigro and the Radio Zagreb Symphony Orchestra. All three LPs are superbly recorded, but Janigro mutes the voice of Haydn's turmoil under a soft quilt of woodwinds...