Classical Records

Exciting the jaded tastes of record buyers is becoming increasingly difficult, and one approach is the dazzling package. Example: RCA Victor is releasing good versions of such standard items as The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Force of Destiny (monaural and stereophonic) in impressive boxes with brass fittings and color-dripping illustrations. Another and more daring approach is to look for obscure, rarely or never-recorded works. Part of the recent growth of operatic exotica is London's Giuditta (three mono and stereo), the principal serious effort of Vienna's operetta master, Franz Lehar, who had lifelong pretensions to grand opera. First produced at the Vienna State Opera in 1934 when Lehar was 63, the work has to do with a Carmen-like doxy in an unidentified southern fishing town who heaps misery on herself and her one true love. The gaudily exotic score boasts some sweetly melting arias, and the performance (with Hilde Gueden and Waldemar Kmentt as principals) is expert, but for the most part Giuditta is not much more than a barefoot Merry Widow.

For Mozartians, Epic offers a series of highlights from La Finta Giardiniera (mono), written when Mozart was 18.

Too precisely patterned for some tastes, this comic romp has some appealing and cunningly devised ensemble passages, some adroit characterizations, and the fascination of genius trembling on the verge of its true career.

Columbia dips into Donizetti's over flowing old trunk of 70-odd operas and comes up with a 3-LP recording of Linda di Chamounix (mono). Written late in the composer's life, the work has a good deal of facile melody, and Antonietta Stella, Renato Capecchi and Cesare Valletti give it a rousing performance. But the libretto, which has to do with a girl driven mad when wrongly accused of being a wanton, is enough to shake anybody but the staunchest Donizetti fan.

French Composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is represented on France's Pathe label in a farcical work titled Platee (mono). The plot deals with the wooing of Jupiter by a spinsterish water nymph. The quicksilvery score, with its pastoral interludes and lavish descriptive effects, is a delight, and the performance is first rate.

Less rare than any of these items, but never before recorded in full, is Das Rheingold, Wagner's thunder-throated masterpiece, presented by London (3 LPs, mono and stereo) in a superb performance. Conductor Georg Solti leads the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with anvil-stroking power; Kirsten Flagstad sings with serene beauty; and George London's Wotan towers with granitic strength. The majestically rolling accompaniment of the gods' procession to Valhalla is sure to lift almost any listener out of his seat.

Other new records:

Mozart: Piano Music for Four Hands (Ingrid Haebler and Ludwig Hoffmann, pianists; Vox, mono). A two-album collection of six four-hand piano sonatas (plus the Andante and Variations in G Major), the first written when Mozart was 9, the last when he was 31, just before he finished Don Giovanni. The treasures here are the Sonata No. 4 in F Major and the Sonata No. 5 in C Major, Pianists Haebler and Hoffmann play them with leafy serenity, geysering wit, and a crystal touch that never grows hard or metallic.

Hanson: The Lament for Beowulf (Howard Hanson conducting the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra and Eastman School of Music Chorus; Mercury, mono and stereo). An early (1925), timbrel-thumping excursion into myth that seems as far from Anglo-Saxon England as Composer Hanson's birthplace (Wahoo, Neb.). The chorus protests too much, but in the gently welling final eulogy, the work stirs with a sweetly nostalgic, gracefully dappled light.

Beethoven: Overture and Incidental Music to "The Ruins of Athens" (Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, mono and stereo). In 1811 Beethoven hurriedly scribbled incidental music to accompany August von Kotzebue's festival play celebrating the opening of a theater in Pest (later part of Budapest). The music is mostly as neglected as the play itself--a fantasy about Minerva awakening after 2,000 years to find Athens in ruins and the last vestiges of culture preserved in Hungary. The work unfolds in a pleasant but innocuously declamatory style that only occasionally echoes Beethoven's sterner periods. Nevertheless, a must for Beethoven followers.

Two Hundred Years of Brass Music (The Chamber Brass Players; Classic Editions, mono). Two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba huff their way through the once enormously popular brass works of several composers, some famed, most of them forgotten--Tielman Susato, Giovanni Gabrieli, Antony Hoiborne, Johann Petzold, Henry Purcell. The burnished sound is properly refulgent, and the flowering, agile compositions themselves will come as a pleasant surprise to many a listener accustomed to the statelier, stuffier uses of modern brass.

Ben Weber: Serenade for Strings (The Galimir String Quartet with David Walter, contrabassist; Epic, mono and stereo). A sinewy, appealing excursion into atonality by one of the foremost U.S. members of the club. For three movements, Composer Weber has his strings weaving melancholy, attenuated fretworks of sound, giving way in the fourth movement to a darkly swelling choir and in the finale to a spasmodically defiant march. Fascinating, if a trifle low in body heat.

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