New Records

"If all the music between 1685 and 1759 were annihilated except the work of Bach and Handel, the ordinary music lover would miss nothing." So wrote Edinburgh University's famed Musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey before World War II. and at the time many a music lover would have agreed. The baroque music of the late 17th and early 18th centuries appealed only to a few long-hair devotees, and it was the rare chamber music group that included works of Italian baroque composers.

Today Sir Donald would have to take another reading. Baroque is a growing fashion, so popular that chamber music groups, armed with a baroque repertory, have popped up in towns from coast to coast, and record companies are cashing in on the boom. With hi-fi to bring out the delicate riches, the companies have issued no fewer than 173 baroque chamber works this year alone. Bach and Handel get their full share and there is also a growing list of lesser Italian composers and "forgotten geniuses" for the ordinary music lover to hear and enjoy.

Among the best of the new recordings:

Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos (Baroque Ensemble of Stuttgart, conducted by Marcel Couraud; Columbia, 2 LPs). Six concertos, each for a different combination of instruments (including horns, oboes, bassoons, flutes, double bass), and each giving an ample showing of Bach's inventiveness and variety which range from dainty to dynamic, once again make clear why Bach is undisputed master of the baroque style.

Handel:Concerti Gross! Opus 6(1 Mu-sici Ensemble; Epic). A mixture of exuberant passages, serene fugues and multivoiced instrumental harmonies, Handel's Concerti Nos. 4, 9 and 10 get the electric tempo they deserve from a brilliant ensemble that was launched in Rome in 1952.

Corelli: Concerti Grossi Opus 6 (Chamber Orchestra of the Societas Musica, directed by Jorgen Ernst Hansen; Vanguard, 3 LPs). An expert in the concerto-grosso form (where a group of solo instruments maintains a dialogue with an orchestral ensemble), Corelli was also the first to relax the strict contrapuntal style of his era, is shown in this recording to have mastered the full scope of string sonorities by making violins sound like a full-voiced choir.

Vivaldi: Concerti (I Musici Ensemble; Epic). Five works for violins, cellos and strings by an Italian composer, the bulk of whose works remained unpublished until the late 19405. Since then, Vivaldi has been recognized as a topflight composer; he switches from gentle, birdlike flutterings to rough bearlike thumpings with masterful agility.

Bonporti: Concerti a Quattro (I Musici Ensemble; Epic). Four of the ten polyphonic concertos, marked Opus n by a recently discovered Italian Jesuit philosopher whose lifelong ambition was not to compose music but to become canon at the Cathedral of Trento. Bonporti (1672-1749), who remained an ordinary priest and died brokenhearted, abandoned Corelli's standard concerto-grosso form, loaded his dialogues between violins, violas and bass with such a personal, rhythmic melody that he became a forerunner of 19th century romanticism.

Eighteenth Century Recorder Music (The Recorder Consort; Classic Editions). Charming, lively chamber works by Alessandro Scarlatti, Jean-Baptiste Loeillet (1680-1730), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) and Bach, proving that the flutelike recorder, usually belittled as an amateur's instrument, can be as stimulating a voice as any woodwind.

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