New Records

COUNT Stop!

Another step and we stand before a

chasm !

We are already face to face with

"opera" . . .

An opera is an absurd thing.

Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself--the relative merits of words and music--and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting for the whole of one golden, 18th century afternoon--a Count and Countess, a Musician and a Poet, a Director and an Actress. The Poet and the Musician, both in love with the Countess, plead their special skills ("The poetic spirit is the mirror of the world!" sings the Poet; "The sounds of nature sing at the cradle of the arts!" replies the Musician). The Director scorns both their arts: "Production is the solution . . . Eloquent gestures, lifelike expressions--basic principle!"

As the day wanes the six decide to compose an opera based on the afternoon's talk, and the Countess is finally left with the agonizing task of choosing between Poetry and Music-- Poet and Composer. In a gently ironic ending she looks deep into her mirror and finds that she can make no choice--her two loves are as one.

Capriccio had its premiere in the war-scarred Munich of 1942 and has only rarely been seen outside since. Now in a complete recording (Angel, 3 LPs) for the first time, it proves to be one of Strauss's most fascinating works. Too static for the stage, it is studded with passages of surpassing orchestral and vocal beauty: the sweetly melancholy string sextet that serves as an overture; the delicately interlaced trio in which Musician, Poet and Countess comment on the Poet's sonnet; the Countess' hushed mirror monologue at the close, with its spun-silver vocal tracery. The performers--notably sopranos Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Anna Moffo, baritones Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau--sing superbly under Conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch. In its flashing orchestral coloration and its soaring vocal lines, Capriccio is an echo of some of the great works of Strauss's youth. At its dress rehearsal the 78-year-old composer said to a friend: "I can do no better." He had done better--in Rosenkavalier and some of the tone poems--but few composers have left behind them a more impressive last operatic testament.

Other new records:

Mozart: Canons (Vienna Academy Chorus, conducted by Guenther Theuring; Westminster). This collection of little-known canons is testimony to opposite sides of Mozart's personality--the ribald and the reverential. Side 1 consists of a number of amiable fancies composed for private performance, and originally studded with the same kind of schoolboy obscenities that mark Mozart's notorious correspondence with his cousin Maria Anna Thekla. Presented in this recording with bowdlerized texts, the canons prove to be slight, cunningly constructed works, as sunny as May wine. Side 2 is a mixture of love laments and sacred works, including a powerfully moving Kyrie for five sopranos, written when Mozart was only a boy of 14.

Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces (Glenn Gould, pianist; Columbia). Written in 1908, Schoenberg's Op. 11 represents one of his first flights into the reaches beyond tonality. Alternately relaxed and sinewy, pensive and alive with pregnant silences, these pieces fall with spare conviction on the modern ear. Pianist Gould plays them--along with Alban Berg's Sonata (Op. 1) and Ernst Krenek's Sonata No. 3 j--with a tone as pure and delicate as a Japanese line drawing.

Poulenc: Dialogues des Carmelites (Denise Duval. Denise Scharley, Rita Gorr; Paris Opera Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Dervaux; Angel, 3 LPs). Poulenc's operatic treatment of the late George Bernanos' reverent drama--first performed at La Scala in February 1957--is now recorded for the first time. It proves again to be a work of shining lyricism and chilling dramatic power. The plot, based on the historical martyrdom of 16 Carmelite nuns during the revolutionary terror in Paris in 1789, unfolds against a marvelously translucent orchestral spectrum, achieves its most moving moments when the dying Mother Superior, against an often muted, funereal figure in the strings, reveals her anguished belief that God has abandoned her. In a terrifying climax the nuns sing a Salve Regina that gradually diminishes in volume as the heads fall one after another to the clearly whomping guillotine.

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor (Kjell Baekkelund. .pianist, with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Oivin Fjeldstad; Camden Stereo). In the hands of young Norwegian Pianist Baekkelund, a sometime record reviewer for an Oslo newspaper, the old warhorse moves in the traces with the springtime grace of a colt. Unknown to U.S. audiences, Baekkelund is billed here as "Scandinavia's most outstanding young pianist." On the evidence of the album he should be able to move with the best of Europe's junior crop.

Beethoven: Twelve Scottish and Irish Songs (Richard Dyer-Bennet, tenor and instrumentalist; Dyer-Bennet Records). These rarely recorded songs are the fruits of a collaboration between Beethoven and a Scottish office clerk named George Thomson, who made a hobby of collecting folk music. To render his songs fit for the igth century drawing room, Thomson hired the best poets and composers of the day--Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Haydn, Beethoven. Between 1806 and 1818 Beethoven set more than 100 songs for Thomson for an estimated -L-550. In this album the towering German genius is improbably linked to such folksy titles as Faithful Johnie and The Lovely Lass of Inverness. All the tunes have a willowy charm, and occasional instrumental passages sound unmistakably vigorous echoes of Beethoven's more familiarly muscular style.

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