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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...
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...