Word: philharmonia
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Orff: Der Mond (Rudolf Christ, Hans Hotter, Karl Schmitt-Walter, Helmut Graml, Paul Kuèn, Peter Lagger; the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch; Angel, 2 LPs). German Composer Carl Orff's second opera (1938) is a modern retread of the Grimm fairy tale about four villagers who steal the moon from neighbors, carry it to their graves, finally lose it to St. Peter, who hangs it in the sky to light "the men who still wait in the little garden of the earth." The fragmented, intermittently lyrical score contains snatches of gutbucket jazz and such...
Rossini: The Barber of Seville (Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Luigi Alva, Nicola Zaccaria, Fritz Ollendorff; Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Alceo Galliera; Angel, 3 LPs). Callas' adroitly wrought Rosina strikes a precarious balance between bubbly naivetè and a subliminal Latin wisdom as shrewd as a fishwife's eye. The Callas voice is in soaring form, buttressed by Baritone Gobbi's smooth, superbly flexible rendering of the role of Figaro and Basso Zaccaria's sumptuous, tomfoolish Basilio. Conductor Galliera provides the coherence and dramatic drive necessary to Rossini's comic frenzy...
Guido Cantelli (Philharmonia Orchestra; Angel). Five months before he was killed in a plane crash in 1956, young Conductor Cantelli, No. 1 protege of the great Toscanini, spent several days recording in London. This posthumous disk presents Cantelli's remarkably fresh reading of a couple of concert cliches: Debussy's L'Aprés-Midi d'un Faune, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe Suite #2. Strained through Cantelli's clear musical consciousness, the lush music flows out simply, movingly, and with none of the sudsy emotional film that so often clouds...
...Debussy): Herbert von Karajan conducting Philharmonia Orchestra...
...listeners inclined to an earlier, lusher and more lyrical Richard Strauss. Angel has a superb new Rosenkavalier (on 4 LPs). Strauss's swirling, silvery tunes never sounded better. Herbert von Karajan, conducting London's Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, is pliant and powerful; Singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Teresa Stich-Randall and Christa Ludwig are uniformly excellent. They invest their climactic closing trio with even more than its usual aching grandeur, while Otto Edelmann's Baron Ochs combines authority with the required asininity...