Word: mono
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Columbia dips into Donizetti's over flowing old trunk of 70-odd operas and comes up with a 3-LP recording of Linda di Chamounix (mono). Written late in the composer's life, the work has a good deal of facile melody, and Antonietta Stella, Renato Capecchi and Cesare Valletti give it a rousing performance. But the libretto, which has to do with a girl driven mad when wrongly accused of being a wanton, is enough to shake anybody but the staunchest Donizetti...
French Composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is represented on France's Pathe label in a farcical work titled Platee (mono). The plot deals with the wooing of Jupiter by a spinsterish water nymph. The quicksilvery score, with its pastoral interludes and lavish descriptive effects, is a delight, and the performance is first rate...
Less rare than any of these items, but never before recorded in full, is Das Rheingold, Wagner's thunder-throated masterpiece, presented by London (3 LPs, mono and stereo) in a superb performance. Conductor Georg Solti leads the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with anvil-stroking power; Kirsten Flagstad sings with serene beauty; and George London's Wotan towers with granitic strength. The majestically rolling accompaniment of the gods' procession to Valhalla is sure to lift almost any listener out of his seat...
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...