Music: November Records

Some phonograph records are musical events. Each month TIME notes the noteworthy.

SYMPHONIC, ETC.

Album of American Music for Orchestra (Eastman-Rochester Symphony, Howard Hanson conducting; Victor: 8 sides). Conductor Hanson’s anthology (mostly of familiar items by Chadwick, MacDowell, et al.) is chiefly remarkable for the first recording of a shimmering little impressionistic piece, Night Soliloquy by a 26-year-old Michigan composer named Kent Wheeler Kennan.

Schubert: Symphony in C Major (London Symphony, Bruno Walter conducting; Victor: 12 sides). First top-notch recording of one of the greatest, and longest, romantic symphonies.

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (London Symphony, Felix Weingartner conducting ; Columbia: 10 sides). Brahms’s most popular symphony, conservatively cut, perfectly tailored.

Mozart: Divertimento No. 10 (K. 247) (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting; Victor: 6 sides) and Divertimento No. 17 (K. 334) (Lener Quartet with Aubrey and Dennis Brain, horns; Columbia: 10 sides). First complete recordings of two early but elegant Mozart items.

Goldmark: “Rustic Wedding” Symphony (Columbia Broadcasting Symphony, Howard Barlow conducting; Columbia: 10 sides). No symphonic architect. Composer Goldmark built pretty trellises and arbors. Conductor Barlow spruces up the most ambitious one.

Album of Early Cantatas and Songs (Isabel French, soprano, and Hugues Cuenod, tenor; Technichord:*10 sides). When 18th-Century Parisian Jean Philippe Rameau took time off from writing the first modern treatise on the art of composition, he composed deft, archaic, but charmingly tuneful music. His cantata L’ Impatience, along with songs and cantatas by Monteverdi, Schütz and Thomas Arne, gives French Tenor Hugues Cuenod a chance for some fancy, old-style tenor-ing.

Bach: Toccatas and Fugues for Organ (Carl Weinrich; Musicraft: 8 sides). On a new facsimile Bach-style organ in Princeton, N. J., able Organist Weinrich plays Bach, Bach-style. Careful transcription makes it the best of its kind on records.

Debussy: Preludes, Book 2 (Walter Gieseking, pianist; Columbia: 12 sides). A top-rank pianist and No. 1 Debussy-boy, massive, snorting, French-born German Pianist Gieseking completes the finest set of Debussy piano performances yet recorded.

Early American Ballads (John Jacob Niles, tenor; Victor: 8 sides). A “hillbilly” who knows where his songs come from (he studied at the University of Lyons and at Oxford) croons The Gypsy Laddie and My Little Mohee, twanging a dulcimer the while.

POPULAR

Love Never Went to College (Hal Kemp; Victor). Bandleader Kemp’s vocalists, “The Smoothies,” earn their name on this glossiest version of Rodger & Hart’s glossiest Too Many Girls tune.

Two Blind Loves (Artie Shaw; Bluebird). Able Composer Harold Arlen sends Three Blind Mice to the conservatory.

What’s New (Bing Crosby; Decca). Once more Crooner Crosby illuminates a dull song by singing it as though it were the best he had ever heard.

Sing Something Simple (Maxine Sullivan; Victor). Of interest not only to popular musical antiquarians (it is from the 1930 Second Little Show) but because Miss Sullivan (Loch Lomond) now sings refined, like all the mediocre white singers before they began imitating her.

*Technichord Records, 39 Worthington Road, Brookline, Mass.