April Records

Some phonograph records are musical events. Each month TIME notes the noteworthy.

SYMPHONIC, ETC.

Howard Hanson: Symphony No. 2 (Eastman-Rochester Symphony, Howard Hanson conducting; Victor: 8 sides), and Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3 (Boston Symphony, Sergei Koussevitzky conducting; Victor: 4 sides). First recordings of two contemporary, respectable U. S. symphonies. Composer Hanson's is tuneful with patches of Teutonic rhetoric; Composer Harris's is dry and intricate, its ancestry Russo-Parisian.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 (Minneapolis Symphony, Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting; Columbia: 10 sides). In his first album with the Minneapolitans, Conductor Mitropoulos (TIME, April 24) proves himself tops, in batonistic oomph, gives this classic one of its finest recordings to date.

Mozart: Requiem Mass, K. 626 (University of Pennsylvania Choral Society with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Harl McDonald conducting; Victor: 12 sides). In 1791, as 35-year-old Mozart neared death in Vienna, a mysterious stranger offered him 50 ducats ($112.50) to write a Requiem. The stranger was an agent of one Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted to pass the composition off as his own. Ill, impoverished Mozart accepted the commission, asked no questions, wrote his Requiem as if for himself. Death took him before the end; his pupils finished the manuscript. His last work, it is also-one of his greatest. This, somewhat heavyhanded, is the only available recording.

Mozart: Symphony in D Major, K.385 (London Philharmonic, Sir Thomas Beecham conducting; Columbia: 5 sides). Magnificent recording of a great late-Mozart symphony.

Bach: Little Organ Book (E. Power Biggs; Victor: 6 sides). Organist Biggs makes Harvard's 18th-Century-model organ sparkle in a sheaf of Gothic choral preludes.

Album of Shakespearean Song (Mordecai Bauman, baritone, Ernst Victor Wolff, harpsichordist; Columbia: 6 sides). Rather lugubriously sung anthology of Shakespeare ditties, most of whose settings (by Thomas Arne) were written in Georgian times, but some of which (It was a Lover and His Lass by Thomas Morley) may actually have been sung in Shakespeare's own productions.

POPULAR

A Lover's Lullaby (Glenn Gray, Decca). Smoothy-of-the-month.

Gone With "What" Wind (Benny Goodman's Sextet, Columbia). Count Basic's piano joins this group for the first time with exciting results.

What Is There to Say (Jack Jenney, Vocation). Good trumpet, good Vernon Duke tune.

Dance La Conga (Columbia). Four-disc set of congas played by the orchestra of Desi Arnaz, the supple Latin glamor boy of Broadway's Too Many Girls. An accompanying set of instructions by Arthur Murray is intended to show purchasers how to conga almost as well as Senor Arnaz.

Ev'ry Sunday Afternoon (Leo Reisman, Victor). Of all attempts to record numbers from Rodgers & Hart's great Higher & Higher score, this is the least soso.

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