Sounds in a Summer Groove

By Christopher Porterfield

Classical

The season's brightest records from oratorio to disco

Haydn: The Seasons (Soprano Ileana Cotrubas, Tenor Werner Krenn, Bass Hans Sotin, Brighton Festival Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Antal Dorati conductor, London; 3 LPs). This is Haydn's other major oratorio, structurally less cohesive and dramatically less powerful than The Creation, but a work in which the aging composer set out to demonstrate all that he could do in a wide range of styles and forms. In other words, a compendium of glories. The text, from James Thomson's panoramic poem written in 1730, inspires passages of musical landscape painting, evocations of the hunt, human scenes of yeomen plowing, spinning, drinking. Dorati is a knowing and devoted Haydn conductor, as he showed in his heroic compilation of all 104 symphonies with the Philharmonia Hungarica. The performance he leads here --warm, spirited, well sung--is the best available on disc, and the only uncut one.

Krzysztof Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high tones that die away like echoes of some remembered grief.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Mussorgsky-Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition. Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite, 1919 version (Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti conductor, Angel). Now that Muti has been appointed to succeed Eugene Ormandy in 1980, listeners will turn to these, his first discs with the orchestra, to see what kind of new leader the Philadelphia has. They will find few conclusive answers. These are unexceptionable performances, clean and firm--if anything, too firm in the emphatic attack in the Beethoven and the clipped chords of the Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. What is missing, and it may be too early to expect it, is a distinctive Muti accent for the orchestra to "speak."

Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic and turbulent with Dostoevskian emotions, it is a tale of small-town adultery and murder, laced with cynicism about the police. Rostropovitch and the cast, including his wife Vishnevskaya, give a caustic, high-velocity performance.

Bach: Six Sonatas for Clavier and Violin (Violinist Henryk Szeryng, Harpsichordist Helmut Walcha, Philips; 2 LPs). Several virtuosos have recorded these crystallizations of the baroque sonata style (Oistrakh, Menuhin, Laredo), but none can beat the suave brilliance of this set. Szeryng plays with an impassioned aristocrat's clarity, grace and brio. Walcha, a virtuoso in his own right, is appropriately brought to the fore by Philips' bright tonal presence.

Benjamin Britten: Spring Symphony (Soprano Sheila Armstrong, Mezzo Janet Baker, Tenor Robert Tear, St. Clement Danes School Boys' Choir, London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Andre Previn conductor, Angel). Berlin born and Hollywood bred, Previn continues to show a surprising flair for English music. Here he leads a zesty performance of a piece that, like so much English music, makes a strength of its provincialism: it has medieval and folk echoes, strikes a resolutely winsome and pastoral note, and is steeped in native literature (with settings of verses by poets from Herrick and Blake to Auden). Britten composed it when he was 35, and he took such an obvious delight in the piquant vocal and instrumental textures that they seem to have bloomed freshly under his pen.

Haydn: String Quartets, Opus 20, Nos. 1-6 (Juilliard Quartet, Columbia; 3 LPs). Propulsive rhythms, a biting attack, hard tonal sheen -- these are the qualities listeners have come to expect from the Juilliard, and they are not necessarily the best qualities for Haydn. But the surprise of this set is the mellowness and suppleness, the emotional inwardness of the performances. All to the good, since these are pivotal works. In them the 40-year-old Haydn deepened the content of his lightly ingratiating early quartets, incorporating folk tunes into a more tightly woven texture and often finishing off with an invigorating fugue.

Schumann: Kreisleriana; Novelettes Nos. 1 and 8 (Pianist Youri Egorov, Peters International). Egorov, 25, is the Russian whose biggest break turned out to be losing out in the 1977 Van Cliburn Piano Competition in Fort Worth. His many disappointed partisans in the audience formed a committee to raise the equivalent of the $10,000 grand prize for him, and he soon had all the publicity and bookings a young art ist needs. As this release shows, he has all the more fundamental qualities a young artist needs too: exuberant virtuosity, a formidable command of pianistic sonorities and lots of sensitive, poetic feeling. --Christopher Porterfield

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