Classical Records

Some of the best recordings of contemporary American music these days are being made by a conductor who is not an American and by an orchestra not resident in the U.S. Akeo Watanabe, 41-year-old conductor of the Japan Philharmonic, is his nation's most gifted interpreter of modern scores; for Composers Recordings, Inc. he has now conducted eight modern American works by composers ranging from Aaron Copland to Halsey Stevens, giving them deft and assured readings.

Conductor Watanabe is the son of a Finnish mother and a Japanese father who became a Lutheran clergyman. A child prodigy on the violin, he studied conducting at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. Unabashedly trading on the influence of his father-in-law, Japan's then Premier Ichiro Hatoyama, Watanabe founded the Japan Philharmonic in 1956, staffed it with young Japanese musicians and one American, Concertmaster Broadus Erie, founder of Manhattan's New Music String

Quartet. Now in the top rank of Japanese orchestras, the Japan Philharmonic plans to come to the U.S. in the 1961-62 season on its first overseas tour.

In his latest C.R.I, release, Watanabe offers Roger Sessions' Symphony No. i and Russell Smith's Tetrameron, neither of them recorded before. Sessions' is a brilliant, rhythmically complex work shot through with passages of surprisingly simple and appealing lyricism; Smith's is a quiet, ten-minute exercise full of odd sonorities. The orchestra plays them both cleanly, with notable purity of tone. The Sessions symphony was taken at a faster tempo than the composer intended, Watanabe recalls, and when Sessions heard of it he cabled, urging that they stick to the "correct tempo." Instead, Watanabe forwarded the tapes and got a second cable from Sessions: "I surrender."

Other new records:

Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet (Amati String Quartet; Columbia). Ruth Seeger, who died in 1953, was one of the U.S.'s few women composers to develop a voice of her own. As demonstrated in this early work, it was compounded of boldly skittering rhythms, moderately fiery dissonances and occasional snatches of homely but not folksy melody. The quartet reads her strongly and well.

French Horn Masterpieces, Vol. II (James Stagliano; Paul Ulanowsky, piano; Boston). An ear-opener for listeners to whom the French horn is little more than an operatic halloo. The composers are Russian and French, most of them dyed-in-the-brass romantics: Gliere, Cui, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Dukas, Faure. The most interesting work is Francis Poulenc's sparsely angular, twelve-tone Elegie written in tribute to Britain's late, great hornist, Dennis Brain. The Boston Symphony's Stagliano summons a rich, clear and remarkably controlled sound.

Handel: Acis & Galatea (Joan Sutherland, Peter Pears, Owen Brannigan, David Galliver; Philomusica of London with the St. Anthony Singers, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult; London). A slightly cut version of the masque that became the most popular of Handel's works in his own lifetime. The score is fresh and frothy, the choral numbers a wonder of vocal crosshatching, and the performance controlled and clear. Soprano Sutherland trills her lines with transparent ease.

Bach: Cantatas (Mack Harrell; orchestra and chorus conducted by Robert Shaw; RCA Victor). The last album recorded by Baritone Harrell before his death at 50 last January. The two cantatas here offered--Nos. 56 and 82--are among the simplest and most serene of the 200-plus Bach wrote. Harrell's reading is rich, secure and wonderfully responsive to the texts' reverent moods.

Martinu: Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani (the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Karl Ancerl; Artia). When the members of the Basel orchestra were asked to play the premiere performance of this work in 1940, they argued that the music was too difficult. Said Conductor Paul Sacher:

"Gentlemen, you do not seem to realize that you have before you a masterpiece!" Czech Composer Martinu, who died in 1959, had in fact produced something less than a masterpiece, but his double concerto nevertheless is a taut and compelling work. The Czech strings negotiate the dissonant score with raw, bludgeoning power.

Songs to Texts by James Joyce (Patricia Neway; Lyrichord). Six composers, including Samuel Barber, set some of Joyce's most famous lines to music. The best are the simplest--Israel Citkowitz' easy-breathing "Strings in the earth and air," Seymour Barab's wistful "My love is in a light attire," both from Chamber Music. Soprano Neway does her best by all the selections, but the delivery inevitably sounds as if riddled with static when she hits lines like

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing

Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

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