Records: Pick of the Pack

George Crumb, Black Angels (13 Images from the Dark Land) for Electric String Quartet (New York String Quartet; CRI, $5.95). The avant-garde LP of the year. In 1968, as a virtual unknown of 39, Crumb won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his orchestral suite Echoes of Time and the River. In the years since, he has been winning something perhaps even more important--a reputation as one of the major innovators of American music. One hallmark of the Crumb style is his fondness for programmatic schemes that can be startling and bizarre, but usually display his uncanny knack for drawing unfamiliar sounds from familiar instruments. "A kind of parable on our troubled world," to quote the composer, Black Angels uses the surrealistic screech of amplified strings to call forth the grim world of night insects in a way the listener is not likely soon to forget. Elsewhere, the players trill with thimble-capped fingers, bow crystal glasses tuned with water, even play maracas and tam-tams. What others might have left at the level of mere gimmickry, Crumb has turned into a chilling evocation of medieval damnation and redemption. Not for easy listening, though.

Songs by Stephen Foster (Mezzo-Soprano Jan DeGaetani, Baritone Leslie Guinn, Pianist Gilbert Kalish; Nonesuch, $2.98). One of the prime movers in the Scott Joplin revival, Nonesuch now appears to be trying the same trick for the composer of Old Black Joe and Old Folks at Home. The company deserves to succeed. Foster (1826-64) was America's first great songwriter, and there is much more in his song bag than just the minstrel ballads with Uncle Tomish lyrics by which he is usually remembered. There is, for example, the sprightly If You've Only Got a Moustache, which could have been written by Schubert. Also Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?, an Italianate duet for Romeo and Juliet. And many more, including, of course, Beautiful Dreamer and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair. Adding to the joy of the album are the authentic accompaniments, played on an 1850 Chickering piano, melodeon, keyed bugle and other instruments at Washington's Smithsonian Institution.

The Art of Joseph Szigeti (Columbia, 6 LPs, $23.98). Now 80 and living in Switzerland, Szigeti at his peak was that rare performer fully entitled to be called both a musicians' musician and a violinists' violinist. With Szigeti, the usual egoistic trappings of the virtuoso life took second place to a kind of earthy piety based on prodigious musical insight and a troth-like pledge between him and the composer. Here are some of his finest concerto recordings--notably the Brahms with Hamilton Harty (1928), the Beethoven with Bruno Walter (1932), the Prokofiev First, Mozart Fourth and the Mendelssohn with Sir Thomas Beecham (1933-35) and, at long last on LP, the Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas Nos. 5 and 10 with Artur Schnabel (1948). Though the sound is monaural, it has been restored lovingly and retains much of the warmth that characterized the best of Europe's prewar 78-r.p.m. shellacs.

Rossini, La Cenerentola (Teresa Berganza, Luigi Alva, Renato Capecchi, Paolo Montarsolo, London Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Opera Chorus, Claudio Abbado conducting; Deutsche Grammophon, 3 LPs, $20.94). Despite the greater popularity of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, this is actually the composer's comic masterpiece, a work in which the stuff of childish fantasy is transformed breathtakingly into the best kind of adult fun and games. In the title role, Spain's Teresa Berganza sings with a bravura coloratura style that (among mezzos) only Marilyn Home might match. Conductor Claudio Abbado not only has opted for a newly cleaned-up version of the score (with spurious arias discarded, and some of Rossini's original instrumentation restored), but has produced a performance totally dedicated to the opera's unceasing wit, sane dramatics and will-o'-the-wisp musical acrobatics.

Stolen Goods, Gems Lifted from the Masters; The Outrageous Dr. Teleny's Incredible Plugged-in Orchestra (Zack Laurence conducting; RCA quadradisc, $5.98). The cover of this album shows a James Bond type suspended by rope above an alarm-rigged floor making a heist of some bejeweled busts of the great composers. The first track is called The People, Yes, and turns out to be Chopin's Revolutionary Etude done up in the sex and violence of an 007 film's sound track. Ludwig's Gig is a lush snippet from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony; Superjoy, an electronically extravagant "lift" of Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring; Wild Turkey, a toe-tapping treatment of Mozart's Turkish Rondo, and so on. Of its jazzing-the-classics type, basically an appalling genre, this is better than most, and the stereo sound from one of RCA's new quadradiscs is stunning. One of the outrageous things about Dr. Teleny is that he does not exist. His orchestra is a London pickup ensemble put together by the creators of the album, Freelance Arrangers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who number Elvis Presley among their clients.

Mozart, Violin Concertos Nos. 1 to 5, Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364 (and other works) (David Oistrakh, soloist and conductor, Berlin Philharmonic; Angel, 4 LPs, $23.92). The riddle of the Sphinx is nothing compared with the mystery of Mozart interpretation. How else explain the existence of so many otherwise great men of music (Horowitz, Stokowski, to name but two) among the ranks of failed Mozarteans? David Oistrakh is emphatically not one of them. His playing (that curvaceous tone especially) has a touch of the romantic, but not enough to tarnish the piquant bloom of youth that imbues all these works. Mostly, Oistrakh's way is a perfect blend of ingenious inner detail and simple, uncomplicated exteriors. That applies also to his viola playing in the Sinfonia Concertante (Son Igor takes the violin solo) as well as to his conducting of the Berlin Philharmonic, which plays with more energy and bite than it usually does under its regular conductor, Herbert von Karajan.

The Sea Hawk, the Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (National Philharmonic Orchestra of London, Charles Gerhardt conducting; RCA, $5.98). In the days when almost everyone loved Hollywood for its epic swashbucklers, almost everyone in Hollywood loved Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his epic, swashbuckling film scores. Starting in 1935 with Captain Blood, Korngold pretty much set the pattern--virtuoso tone poems that reinforced character with melodic motif, heightened situation with orchestral effect and commented relentlessly on just about everything taking place on screen. Such gems as The Constant Nymph, Kings Row, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Sea Hawk followed.

All these and more are handsomely recorded on this LP under the supervision of Korngold's producer son George. The record is also the only stereo document currently available of a composer who was one of Europe's most brilliant prodigies half a century ago. When Korngold was 13, Artur Schnabel was playing his piano sonata in Vienna and Berlin. Four years later Conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer were doing his orchestral works. In 1921, when Korngold was 24, his opera The Dead City was mounted at the Metropolitan Opera, and legendary Soprano Maria Jeritza made her debut in it. Korngold promised much, but he kept that promise, sad to say for the world of serious music, in Hollywood, where he died in 1957.

Bach, Italian Concerto, English Suite No. 2, French Suite No. 6, Fantasia in C Minor (Pianist Alicia de Larrocha; London, $5.98). Once best known for her exquisite interpretations of fellow Spaniards like De Falla, Turina and Granados, De Larrocha has been cutting a new Continental image for herself in recent years. That includes some scintillating Chopin and Mozart, and now this disk, which is breathtaking in its dramatic separation of contrapuntal lines, ravishing ornamentations and sheer pianistic delight.

Beethoven, The Five Cello and Piano Sonatas (Cellist Pierre Fournier, Pianist Artur Schnabel; Seraphim, 2 LPs, $5.96). Whether darkly probing his psyche or demonstrating sheer joy, Beethoven was a composer who believed that music should be dramatic and expressive. So, fortunately, do Fournier and Schnabel, in this historic collaboration dating from 1948, now issued in its entirety for the first time on an American LP. It is hereby recommended as an antidote for today's "cool" and bloodless school of Beethoven interpretation.

Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (Tenor Jon Vickers, Soprano Helga Dernesch, Soprano Christa Ludwig, Baritone Walter Berry, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting; Angel, 5 LPs, $29.90). What a cast of performers! What a disappointment! Given Karajan's past flair for Wagner, not to mention stalwart Tenor Vickers as Tristan, this could well have been, the stereo statement of Wagner's endless paean to adultery. Instead, it is merely a smooth, workmanlike job, hampered by Dernesch's inability to make Isolde alive enough so that her death is significant. The record is also marred by the cavernous, "first-row-of-the-balcony" acoustics that Karajan seems to enjoy these days. The 20-year-old Tristan, starring Kirsten Flagstad and Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, incomparable and still available in excellent mono, remains the set to have.

Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (assorted soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Wilhelm Furtwaengler conducting; Seraphim, 19 LPs, $53.98). With Beethoven and Brahms, Furtwaengler could be infuriatingly eccentric. When he was conducting Wagner, though, his stately, expansive, analytic style produced performances that were ingeniously congruent with the composer's convoluted purpose. Drawn from a 1953 series of radio broadcasts from Rome in mono sound that ranges from only dim to adequate, this is a Ring that every Wagnerian will at least want to hear, and probably own as a low-priced but high-keyed contrast to excellent latter-day sets by Solti and Karajan.

The Anna Russell Album (Columbia, 2 LPs, $6.98). In case of a Christmas overdose of Wagner, try this chaser concocted by the crown princess of musical parody. As Miss Russell plays the piano and sings, her hilarious analysis of the Ring is based on the reasonable premise that the way to solve the crime (operatic especially) is to learn the motif. "The scene opens," she chirps, "in the River Rhine. IN IT!" The Rhine Maidens? "A sort of aquatic Andrew Sisters." Wotan? "The head god, and a crashing bore, too." The incestuous relationship between Sigmund and Sieglinde? "That's the beauty of grand opera, you can do anything as long as you sing it." The beauty of Russell is that the more you know about the Ring, the funnier the record is. That goes for the other soliloquies in the album as well, notably the bubble-bursting How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.

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