New Records

One of the most prolific composers in the recent history of opera was British-born (of French descent) Piano Virtuoso Eugene d'Albert. In a career otherwise occupied with six marriages, teaching and lucrative concert tours, he managed to compose 20 musical melodramas, ending with a preposterous oriental olio called Mr. Wu that he left unfinished when he died in 1932. Most of his concoctions were unqualified flops, partly because Composer d'Albert had difficulty deciding whose horn he was tooting--Puccini's or Richard Strauss's. The only currently heard remnant of his life's work is Tiefland (1903). Often played in Germany and occasionally produced in the U.S., it has now been painstakingly embalmed by Epic on 2 LPs.

The libretto tells of a simple shepherd who descends from the Pyrenees into the worldly "Tiefland" (the Lowland) to marry his master's doxy. When he mistakenly suspects that his bride's inclination is still to the manor bed, he at first considers stabbing her, later hits on the happier solution of strangling the landowner and loping back to the hills with his wife in his arms. This tale is set to an expansive, thickly melodic score which rarely bears any relation to the frenzies on stage but occasionally strikes some fine Straussian and Puccinian sparks. Recorded by a top-notch cast (including Dutch Soprano Gre Brouwenstijn, Tenor Hans Hopf, Baritone Paul SchOeffler, Bass Oskar Czerwenka), the album provides opera buffs with a rare look at a gifted but remote composer.

Other new records:

Rossini: The Barber of Seville (Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Luigi Alva, Nicola Zaccaria, Fritz Ollendorff; Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Alceo Galliera; Angel, 3 LPs). Callas' adroitly wrought Rosina strikes a precarious balance between bubbly naivete and a subliminal Latin wisdom as shrewd as a fishwife's eye. The Callas voice is in soaring form, buttressed by Baritone Gobbi's smooth, superbly flexible rendering of the role of Figaro and Basso Zaccaria's sumptuous, tomfoolish Basilio. Conductor Galliera provides the coherence and dramatic drive necessary to Rossini's comic frenzy.

Hindemith: Concert Music for Piano, Brass and Two Harps; Concerto for Orchestra (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Decca). Composer Paul Hindemith himself conducts two samples from transitional points (1930 and 1935) in his career. Concert Music plays sounding brasses against whispering harps and a trip-hammered piano in a mood of agitated melancholy; Concerto opens with the full orchestra piling forward over chiseling strings at a martial trot that is remarkable for its sheer momentum and verve. Neither piece is vintage Hindemith, but both are expert, sophisticated and full of orchestral surprises.

Riegger: Symphony No. 4 (University of Illinois Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bernard Goodman; U. of Illinois Recording Series). One of the most consistently experimental of U.S. composers in a typically dissonant and percussive vein. The slow movement, taken from a dance score composed in 1936 for Martha Graham, is more loosely stitched and considerably less appealing than the rest of the work, but Composer Wallingford Riegger winds matters up in bold fashion with a striding, Western-flavored theme as muscularly rambunctious as an unfettered bull.

Orff: Der Mond (Rudolf Christ, Hans Hotter, Karl Schmitt-Walter, Helmut Graml, Paul Kuen, Peter Lagger; the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch; Angel, 2 LPs). German Composer Carl Orff's second opera (1938) is a modern retread of the Grimm fairy tale about four villagers who steal the moon from neighbors, carry it to their graves, finally lose it to St. Peter, who hangs it in the sky to light "the men who still wait in the little garden of the earth." The fragmented, intermittently lyrical score contains snatches of gutbucket jazz and such unorthodox sonorities as a chorus singing through megaphones, a shrieking oscillator, an accompaniment of organ, harmonium, piano, celesta and wind machine. This occasionally blurred performance has its strongly moving moments, but many listeners may feel that Composer Orff's moon has set before it has fairly risen.

Serge Prokofiev (the composer at the piano, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Piero Coppola; Angel). This new entry in Angel's "Great Recordings of the Century" series presents Prokofiev's own performance of his Third Concerto as he recorded it in London in 1932. Pianist Prokofiev sails through the familiar, exhilarating, gently ironic music with a rock-sure rhythmic stride, a springy touch and a tone that can melt or soar into green lyrical fancies.

Irmgard Seefried Sings (accompanied by Erik Werba; Decca). Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben and nine songs by Mozart sung with grace, liquid power and a rainbow of colorations that few singers can match. With a fine dramatic sense to match her voice, Soprano Seefried makes this one of the year's most appealing recorded song recitals.

Rossini: Le Comte Ory (Sari Barabas, Cora Canne-Meijer, Juan Oncina, Michel Roux; the Glyndebourne Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Vittorio Gui; Angel, 2 LPs). "A collection of diverse beauties," said Berlioz of Rossini's next-to-last opera, "which would make the fortune not of one but of two or three operas." The melodic beauties are there in full measure, as this first recording of Le Comte demonstrates, but linked together they constitute not three operas but a splintered fragment of one. The work has some rich ensemble climaxes and some rippling solo parts, but after one and a half acts of inspired buffoonery about a predatory count and a lovesick countess, the opera degenerates into a downhill scramble toward a baldly telescoped ending. The sporadically brilliant music gets an adequate performance from the Glyndebourne crew.

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