Word: soloed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Byrd: The Four& Five-Part Masses (Pro Musica Antiqua conducted by Safford Cape; EMS). These two Masses for solo voices were composed during the Reformation in England, when Roman Catholic services were forbidden. The music is a fine sample of Byrd's mastery of counterpoint and his heartfelt devotion. It is sympathetically sung by Belgian specialists in fine music of bygone days...
Guitar Recital (Luise Walker; Epic). Solo works by such bygone masters of the classical guitar as Fernando Sor and Francisco Tarrega and a three-movement Concertino for Guitar and Orchestra by the contemporary Brazilian composer, Guido Santorsola, accompanied by the Vienna Symphony under Paul Sacher. The big work is ideal for records, where the quiet colors of the solo instrument can be clearly heard and its gently modern effects fall pleasantly...
Cathedral Hush. Everything following might be expected to be anticlimactic, but Berlioz achieves perhaps his greatest effects in the quieter passages that grip the heart after all the thunder. The superb Sanctus calls for a tenor solo in which, by a dazzling piece of orchestration, the single, defenseless human voice is set off against the relentless clash of cymbals; and in the sweet, concluding Agnus Dei, there are chilling traces of jagged pagan rhythms (later used by Stravinsky). Conductor Munch tenderly and forcefully drove toward the end, spinning out the Amen with a loving final touch. A cathedral hush hung...
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 6 (Helen Schnabel; Vienna Orchestra conducted by F. Charles Adler; SPA). Beethoven arranged this number himself at the behest of a publisher who offered him hard cash. It is a piano version of his famed Violin Concerto, its singing solo part reinforced by octaves, its cadenzas (including a ground-breaking passage for piano and timpani) especially written for the occasion. Not as silly as it might seem...
...front row. Next day the London Times summed up: "The tone . . . was sufficiently rich and warm to fire any composer's imagination, but [Catelinet] did not suggest that the tuba can do much in the way of varied phrasing or dynamic nuance to repay promotion to a solo status...