New Records

Observers who believe today's search for new musical sounds is neurotic may be right, but the search continues with the frenzy of a uranium hunt. Westminster, a member of the recording elite, takes a flyer into sonic oddities with Soundproof, a collection of popular tunes played on doctored pianos by Louis Teicher and Arthur Ferrante.

Pianists Teicher. 31, and Ferrante, 34, have played together so long that friends think they are beginning to look like each other, tend to communicate with each other through keyboard tones rather than spoken words. First as students, then as instructors at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, they experimented with piano sound by placing all kinds of objects among the strings, a method pioneered by Composer John Cage, who called it "prepared piano." In 1948 they succeeded in producing a thudding drum effect (by shoving pieces of rubber between the strings) and used it in their version of Ravel's Bolero. Their latest effort is even weirder. The tunes in Soundproof (Greensleeves, Baia, Lover) contain effects that resemble giant rubber bands being plucked, the click of a tack hammer, xylophones and harpsichords, and a sound like a Hawaiian guitar quivering on the breeze. To play these tricks, Pianists Ferrante and Teicher not only mute the strings with wads of paper, bits of wood and metal bars, but also pluck the strings while holding down keys for resonance, and even scratch the strings with their fingernails. For all their eccentric behavior. Teicher and Ferrante are master technicians and men of taste; the performances in Soundproof are honed and burnished to perfection.

Other new records:

Antheil: the Wish (Kentucky Opera Association, Louisville Orchestra conducted by Moritz Bomhard-Louisville Orchestra Commissioning Series). A one-act opera, written and composed by a master orchestrator with a surrealist imagination. The plot is wispish and dreamlike, designed to prove that love is eternal. The music is tuneful, often witty and sometimes engrossing, although it shows signs of its creator's glib pen.

Igor Stravinsky Chamber Works 1911-1954 (Columbia). A representative collection, presumably played as well as possible, since the composer himself is brandishing the baton. At one stylistic extreme is his Septet, which makes use of a method of composition similar to that used by his late rival. Arnold (Twelve-Tone) Schoenberg. At the other extreme are Stravinsky's early songs, orchestrated recently, which, in Marni Nixon's bell-clear soprano, have a childlike charm.

Jolivet: Works (Champs-Elysees Theater Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour; London). A showcase for one of France's most colorful contemporary composers. The compositions on exhibit are his lyrical Andante for Strings, his Concertino for Trumpet, String Orchestra and Piano, which combines a parade-ground knowledge of the trumpet with a bouncing sense of fun, and his Piano Concerto, which opens with an inferno of featureless percussion and sizzling .strings, continues with a slow movement of steamy mystery, and winds up with a recurring Latin American dance rhythm. Eeriest moments come when a flute seems to swell and shrink like a small-scale fire siren.

Orff: Trionfo di Afrodite (Soloists: Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Eugen Jochum; Decca). The third part of German Composer Orff's controversial trilogy (the first two: Carmina Bu ana, Catulli Carmina). This one is a pagan hymn to love. Orff's music, which is sometimes derided as no music at all, is mostly inflection and punctuation, weighted by repeats, lifted by sharp verbal accents, leavened by occasional vocal arabesques. Music or no, it is strangely compelling stuff.

Robert Craft Conducting Schoenberg (Columbia). Six significant works by the man who shifted the entire foundation of musical composition in the 20th century. Four of them are in his revolutionary twelve-tone technique; all provide fascinating, sometimes irritating, ear-tweaking listening.

Sessions: Second String Quartet (New Music Quartet; Columbia). A recent (1951) work in the composer's smoothly flowing, endless-melody style. The idiom is dissonant counterpoint, but the effect is comparatively serene as the music accumulates in the listener's consciousness. The work eventually recedes into the everyday atmosphere in a vague and somehow pathetic ending.

A Spanish Guitar Recital (Maria Luisa Anido; Capitol). The sensitive instrument, with its distinctly Iberian inflections, sings sweetly for Argentine Guitarist Anido. Her intimate program covers three centuries of Spanish music by such composers as Granados, Albeniz, Sanz, et al.

The Virtuoso Orchestra (Boston Symphony conducted by Charles Munch; RCA Victor). The orchestra, which has twice become famed for its winning ways with French music, again shows what it can do with the luminous clouds and glittering rapiers of sound created by Impressionists Debussy and Ravel. Most of the music (Afternoon of a Faun, La Valse, Bolero) is almost familiar enough to be a bore, but Rapsodie Espagnole is probably Ravel's most nearly perfect work, and Conductor Munch wields his orchestra throughout with the precision of a surgeon and the fantasy of a good painter.

The Unabashed Virtuoso (Stephen Kovacs, piano; Elektra). An aptly titled album, containing mostly virtuosic paraphrases (of Fledermaus, Rigoletto) and arrangements of orchestral pieces (Danse Macabre, Hungarian Rhapsody #2), done up with plenty of fireworks and a gratifying portion of delicacy and taste.

Verdi: La Traviata (Rosanna Carteri, Cesare Valletti, Leonard Warren; the Rome Opera House Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Pierre Monteux; Victor, 3 LPs). A fat package, containing a handsome, bound volume of Dumas' Camille (from which the opera was taken), the libretto in Italian and English and, incidentally, a good performance of the opera.

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