Word: mono
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mozart: Piano Music for Four Hands (Ingrid Haebler and Ludwig Hoffmann, pianists; Vox, mono). A two-album collection of six four-hand piano sonatas (plus the Andante and Variations in G Major), the first written when Mozart was 9, the last when he was 31, just before he finished Don Giovanni. The treasures here are the Sonata No. 4 in F Major and the Sonata No. 5 in C Major, Pianists Haebler and Hoffmann play them with leafy serenity, geysering wit, and a crystal touch that never grows hard or metallic...
Hanson: The Lament for Beowulf (Howard Hanson conducting the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra and Eastman School of Music Chorus; Mercury, mono and stereo). An early (1925), timbrel-thumping excursion into myth that seems as far from Anglo-Saxon England as Composer Hanson's birthplace (Wahoo, Neb.). The chorus protests too much, but in the gently welling final eulogy, the work stirs with a sweetly nostalgic, gracefully dappled light...
Beethoven: Overture and Incidental Music to "The Ruins of Athens" (Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, mono and stereo). In 1811 Beethoven hurriedly scribbled incidental music to accompany August von Kotzebue's festival play celebrating the opening of a theater in Pest (later part of Budapest). The music is mostly as neglected as the play itself-a fantasy about Minerva awakening after 2,000 years to find Athens in ruins and the last vestiges of culture preserved in Hungary. The work unfolds in a pleasant but innocuously declamatory style that only occasionally echoes Beethoven...
...Hundred Years of Brass Music (The Chamber Brass Players; Classic Editions, mono). Two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba huff their way through the once enormously popular brass works of several composers, some famed, most of them forgotten-Tielman Susato, Giovanni Gabrieli, Antony Hoiborne, Johann Petzold, Henry Purcell. The burnished sound is properly refulgent, and the flowering, agile compositions themselves will come as a pleasant surprise to many a listener accustomed to the statelier, stuffier uses of modern brass...
...Weber: Serenade for Strings (The Galimir String Quartet with David Walter, contrabassist; Epic, mono and stereo). A sinewy, appealing excursion into atonality by one of the foremost U.S. members of the club. For three movements, Composer Weber has his strings weaving melancholy, attenuated fretworks of sound, giving way in the fourth movement to a darkly swelling choir and in the finale to a spasmodically defiant march. Fascinating, if a trifle low in body heat...