Music: All-Time Favorites

RCA Victor was out to wrap up a fast-selling Christmas package (and incidentally promote its 45-r.p.m. doughnut-hole discs). The question was what to put in it. The obvious answer was to prowl through nearly 50 years of sales files and figures, pick out its “alltime favorites.” Victor’s selections, announced last week, seemed to put the U.S.’s musical brow somewhere between chin and navel. The first eight: Strauss’s The Blue Danube (conducted by Leopold Stokowski); La Donna è Mobile, from Verdi’s Rigoletto (sung by Caruso); Carry Me Back to Old Virginny (sung by Marian Anderson); Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum (performed by the First Piano Quartet); Victor Herbert’s Italian Street Song (sung by Jeanette MacDonald); Bluebird of Happiness (sung by Jan Peerce); Jalousie (performed by the Boston Pops Orchestra); Make Believe, from Show Boat (sung by Allan Jones).