Word: mono
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Thomas Beecham recorded the work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus (Jennifer Vyvyan, Monica Sinclair, Jon Vickers, Giorgio Tozzi; RCA Victor, 4 LPs, mono and stereo). His performance is the most opulent of the lot, the most animated-and by all odds the farthest from any thought in Handel's mind. In defiance of "drowsy armchair purists," Beecham offers a thunderously 19th century-styled orchestration-lush, richly colored, and full of dramatic contrasts. Soloists and chorus are uniformly fine, but the recording is not for listeners who take their Handel neat. Eugene Ormandy offers a severely cut reading...
...Malcolm Sargent produces a package (Elsie Morison, Marjorie Thomas, Richard Lewis, James Milligan; the Huddersfield Choral Society; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, 3 LPs, mono and stereo) that lacks the fire of Beecham, the vocal glories of some of the Ormandy passages, emerges as painstaking rather than impassioned. Perhaps the best performance of the crop is furnished by Hermann Scherchen (Pierrette Alarie, Nan Merriman, Leopold Simoneau, Richard Standen; the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Academy Chorus; Westminster, 4 LPs, stereo), which is marked by some lovely, light-textured choral passages, a translucent orchestral sound and a movingly...
Busoni: Fantasia Contrappuntistica (Egon Petri; Westminster, mono). In this stylistic tour de force, Italian Pianist-Composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) started with a chorale prelude and then, using subjects from an unfinished fugue by Bach, spun out four three-part fugues, one of them built on the name and the four notes B-A-C-H.* Throughout, Busoni gradually modernized his musical vocabulary, ending with a style marked by thick, dissonant clusters of notes. The effect, as presented by Dutch Pianist Petri, is a little like watching a nature film in which plants miraculously blossom and grow before the viewer...
Lalo: Piano Concerto (Orazio Frugoni, pianist; Vox, mono). French Composer Edouard Lalo (1823-92) is remembered chiefly for his Symphonic Espagnole, but he also wrote a number of operas, chamber works and concertos, of which this is one of the most engaging. Urbane, exotically colored, it sparkles in this recording with the prismatic fascination of a many-tiered chandelier...