The Year's Best

More people bought more phonograph records (300 million) last year than in any year since Thomas Edison recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb. If they were guided by the critics at all, record-buyers frequently found the critics disagreeing. Last week, for the first time, five U.S. music critics* sang in harmony. For a magazine called the Review of Recorded Music they picked the year's best classical recordings. Only Conductor Arturo Toscanini (see above) won two ribbons. The critics' choices:

Concerto: Brahms's lone Violin Concerto, by Joseph Szigeti with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Columbia).

Symphony (tie): Mahler's Symphony No. 4, by Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic and Desi Halban, soprano (Columbia); and Haydn's Symphony No. 98, by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony (Victor).

Short Orchestral Work: Weber's Der Freischuetz overture, by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony (Victor).

Program Music: Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring ballet score, by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony (Victor).

Opera Album: Mozart operatic arias,by the Metropolitan Opera's Basso Ezio Pinza (Columbia). Best single record: Verdi's Dite alia giovine (from La Traviata), by the Met's Licia Albanese and Robert Merrill (Victor).

Instrumental Solo: Bach's Goldberg Variations, by Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (Victor).

Vocal Album: Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin, by Soprano Lotte Lehmann (Columbia).

Chamber Music: Mozart's Quintet in C (K. 515), by the Budapest String Quartet and Milton Katims (Columbia). Best single record: Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes, by the William Nowinski Sextet (Disc).

* The five: the New York Times's Howard Taubman, the New York Sun's Irving Kolodin, the Cincinnati Enquirer's Frederick Yeiser, the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein, Good Housekeeping's George Marek.

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