New Records

At first, on the 18th century's musical scene, Christoph Willibald Gluck seemed just another run-of-the-court opera composer. The threadbare romantic plots he used served mainly to give virtuoso singers something on which to string their purple-beaded arias. But Gluck became known as a daring revolutionary in 1762 when he wrote Orfeo ed Euridice, a work free of such "disfiguring abuses" as stock romantic situations and metaphorical arias. For years, he preached the virtues of Greek naturalism. After Gluck's death, better composers than he utilized some of his reforms, while Orfeo all but disappeared from the standard repertory (the Met revived it two years ago). Now the endless search for operatic treasure has driven the recordmakers back to Gluck; both Epic and Decca have issued nearly complete versions of the opera (and RCA Victor is recording its own version in Rome).

The new recordings of Orpheus and Eurydice break with tradition by casting a male singer as Orpheus, normally sung by a contralto. (Gluck himself wrote the role for a male contralto, later rearranged it for tenor in Paris, where castrati singers were frowned upon.) Of the two versions, Epic's (in French) is more authentic historically, but less effective, chiefly because Canadian Tenor Leopold Simoneau's silver-hued voice seems less moving in the role of the suffering Orpheus than the lyric baritone of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, imaginatively cast by Decca in its German-language version. The supporting casts in both albums are excellent: Sopranos Suzanne Danco and Pierette Alarie (Epic), Maria Stader and Rita Streich (Decca). Despite the good singing, the recordings suffer from the opera's basic structural fault. Groundbreaker though he was in his own day, Composer Gluck stuck too closely to wearisome, undramatic alternation of choral passages and recitatives, thus kept his often lovely work from stirring into full-bodied life.

Other new records:

Menotti: The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (Chorus and instrumental ensemble conducted by Thomas Schippers in cooperation with the New York City Ballet; Angel). Menotti's bittersweet madrigal fable of a lonely poet's struggle with "the indifferent killers of the Poet's dreams" seems almost as effective in recording as it did on the stage (TIME, Nov. 5). The libretto, in clearest English, is thorny with barbed wit, and the music is alternately exuberant and shadowed with the gentle melancholy the poet-hero feels as he slowly dies, surrounded by "the pain-wrought children of my fancy."

Rousseau: Le Devin du Village (Janine Micheau, Nicolai Gedda, Michel Roux; Louis de Froment Chamber Orchestra conducted by Louis de Froment; Angel). This first complete recording of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's one-act opera explains why he is scarcely remembered as a composer. After dabbling without much success with ballet scores, he turned to opera bouffe, managed to get The Village Soothsayer produced at Fontainebleau to Louis XV's praise. Almost 40, Rousseau had just scored his first literary success (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences), and he never returned to music as a serious occupation. This may not have been philosophy's gain, but it was scarcely music's loss. Before the opera's Colette wins her Colin, she is forced to sing her way through a passel of tuneful but often cloying country airs, and learns that the "heartfelt enjoyments" do not go with the "noise and splendor they boast of in town." Fine performances by Soprano Micheau and Tenor Gedda help make the back-to-nature message tolerable.

Liszt: Hungarian Fantasia, Piano Concerto No. I in E-Flat (Gyorgy Cziffra, pianist, the Paris Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Pierre Dervaux; Angel). This 35-year-old pianist escaped from Hungary last November, has since been touted in Europe as the find of the season. He flails the keyboard with fine abandon in his first Western recording, proves that he has big style and pyrotechnical skill. But the record suggests that he might trip over his own frantic fingers in a less exuberant, more Liszt-less program.

The Cries of London (The Deller Consort: Alfred Deller, April Canlelo, Wilfred Brown, the Ambrosian Singers and London Chamber Players conducted by Alfred Deller; Vanguard). A collection of the popular "fantasies" of Jacobean England, in which composers such as Thomas Weelkes, Richard Dering and Thomas Ravenscroft set the raucous cries of London peddlers to polished, motetlike instrumental forms. Countertenor Deller's round, flexible alto soars plaintively through the shabby lyrics: "Have you any rats, mice, polecats or weasels? I can kill them, and I can kill . . . vermin that creepeth up and down."

Claflin: La Grande Breteche (Patricia Brinton, Richard Owens, William Blankenship: the Vienna Orchestra conducted by F. Charles Adler; Composers Recordings). Balzac's tale of a jealous husband who walls up the closet in which his wife's lover is hiding has fascinated several modern composers, but none have used it more effectively than former Bank President Avery Claflin. His richly colored work sings with a sustained lyricism that quietly underscores the tragedy, lends a bittersweet bite to the anguished text.

Carpenter: Adventures in a Perambulator (Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson; Mercury). This recording of the first major orchestral work by another businessman-composer, John Alden Carpenter (Krazy Kat, Skyscrapers), offers a musical excursion into the mind of a child on his first tour through the park: "The Policeman; an Unprecedented Man! I try to analyze his appeal; I suspect it is the way he walks. He walks like Doom." The slickly orchestrated score sounds echoes of Debussy, but in the more original passages it has a madcap freshness all its own.

Mozart: La Finta Semplice (Dorothea Siedberg, Edith Oravez. George Maran, August Jaresch, Alois Pernerstorfer: the Camerata Academica of the Salzburg Mozarteum conducted by Bernhard Paumgartner; Epic, 2 LPs). Mozart's first opera here gets a busy but clear-lined first complete performance on records. Child Prodigy Mozart handled Carlo Goldoni's boisterous love plot like a man who has been there before--a breathtaking performance by a twelve-year-old.

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