SYMPHONIC, ETC.

Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire

(chamber orchestra conducted by Composer Schoenberg, with recitation by Erika Stiedry-Wagner; Columbia; 8 sides; $4.50). Twenty-one poems of Albert Giraud are wailed and caterwauled in musical speech (Sprechstimme) to the fevered sounds of eight strings and woodwinds (in various combinations). Modernist Schoenberg's jittery measures, more talked about than listened to (Pierrot has had only two U.S. performances), here get their first recording, a fine example of what, 30 years ago, began to ail 20th-century music.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D Major (Minneapolis Symphony conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos; Columbia; 12 sides; $6.50). Composer Mahler, who died in 1911, was the last and least appreciated of the great Central European symphonists. His fledgling work, songful and ironic (in a jocular funeral march on the round Frere Jacques), gets a rousing first recording.

Brahms: Double Concerto in A Minor (Jascha Heifetz, violinist, Emanuel Feuermann, cellist, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy; Victor; 8 sides; $4.50). Bearded Brahms at his most robust; performance, perfect; recording, flawless.

Donizetti: The Daughter of the Regiment, Four Arias (Soprano Lily Pons, with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra conducted by Pietro Cimara; Columbia; 4 sides; $2.50). Coloraturing from a Metropolitan hit of last season.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 1 in F Major (Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Columbia; 8 sides; $4.50). Soviet Composer Shostakovich's exuberant, revolutionary thumps and trumpet calls needed an up-to-date needling, get it here.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham; Columbia; 10 sides; $5.50). These shopworn Tchaikovsky tunes scarcely warranted another going-over, but Beecham's is the best job yet.

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