The Year's Best LPs

Beethoven: Quartet No. 14, Op. 131; Yale Quartet (Vanguard Cardinal). Even the young Guarneris cannot match this inciting and insightful performance.

Beethoven: The 32 Piano Sonatas; Claude Frank; 12 LPs (RCA Victrola). Not only the first complete 32 ever recorded in the U.S., but one of the two or three best since Artur Schnabel set the record in the 1930s.

Berlioz: Les Troyens; 5 LPs (Philips). Berlioz' grandest achievement recreated for the first time on records by his greatest current interpreter, Conductor Colin Davis.

Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps (Columbia); Debussy: Pel leas et Melisande; 3 LPs (Columbia). Under the baton of that red-blooded logician, Pierre Boulez, all is rite in Stravinsky's polysavage world and all is light in Debussy's interplay between symbol and reality.

Schubert: Lieder, Volume 1, 171 songs, 12 LPs; Volume II, 234 songs; 13 LPs (Deutsche Grammophon). Schubert was a better song writer than even Bob Dylan; here is the irrefutable evidence from the master of Lied, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Jesus Christ, Superstar; 2 LPs (Decca). An evocative modern passion play offers the first real proof that rock can deal with major subjects.

All Things Must Pass; 2 LPs plus a jam-session bonus LP; George Harrison (Apple). Georgeous in every way.

Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection (Uni). Two intriguingly diverse LPs from a young Englishman who may be the first of a new breed of rock superstars.

Sweet Baby James (Warner Brothers). Silvery-voiced James Taylor shines through the wilderness of commercial rock like the major musical poet he is.

Bitches Brew; 2 LPs (Columbia). With this heady, often shattering sonic fusion of rock's electronics and the classic avant-garde's aleatory atonalism, Trumpeter Miles Davis shakes jazz to its roots.

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