Music: Classical Records

The house in Beverly Hills, Calif., is gabled brick, inset with casement windows. To its door last week paraded a steady file of visitors, intent on paying their respects to the erect, shock-haired old man who lives there in semiseclusion. At 83, Berlin-born Conductor Bruno Walter had achieved one of the triumphs of a memorable career: his second complete recording of the nine Beethoven symphonies. At various times, mostly in the 1940s and ’50s, Walter had made other recordings of the nine. But Columbia decided on a repeat performance with latest recording techniques, including stereo. The job was done with a specially hired orchestra of Los Angeles musicians in a hall not far from Bruno Walter’s home. There, day after day over a span of six months, the old man led his men in the performances that he hopes will stand as “a kind of testament to the feeling I have for Beethoven.”

The result is a seven-disk set of remarkable clarity, in which the various elements of the orchestra stand forth in superbly wrought detail. In the comparatively calm air of the early symphonies and of the Pastoral, the orchestra sings with a kind of warmth and lyric affection typical of Walter’s musical vision. In the sterner period of the Seventh and Ninth, it takes on an incandescence and brilliance that elevate both performances to dazzling heights. Not all of the set is equally good, but all of it is imbued in some degree with Walter’s ageless enthusiasm. At one point during the rehearsal of the Third Symphony, he exhorted the strings to greater effort, rewarded them with an ecstatic cry: “There you are! And it’s paradise! Such a pianissimo! Oh, to be in paradise!” Then Octogenarian Walter paused. “No,” he added, “not too soon.”

Other new records:

Bach: Arias (The Bach Aria Group, conducted by William Scheide; Decca). One of the nation’s finest chamber groups, including Soprano Eileen Farrell and Tenor Jan Peerce, offers masterful performances of some little-known arias and duets from the Bach cantatas. At least two of them—Gott versorget alles Leben from Cantata 187 and Wenn kommt der Tag from Cantata 70—deserve a place on any Bach shelf.

The Virtuoso Oboe (Andre Lardrot, oboe; the Vienna State Opera Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Felix Prohaska; Vanguard). Oboist Lardrot flitters his agile way through selections from Cimarosa, Handel, Haydn, Albinoni in a delightful demonstration of the richly colored range of one of the orchestra’s less glamorous members. Haydn’s Concerto in

¶Major for Oboe and Orchestra alone is worth the price of the package.

John Cage: Indeterminacy (Music by David Tudor; Folkways, 2 LPs). In a search for a “new aspect of form,” Composer Cage has glued 90 spasmodically rhythmic anecdotes (on such random subjects as a mushroom exhibition in Paris, a bridge-playing composer in “the loony bin”) to the piano and electronic music of Fellow-Composer Tudor. The result is new, all right, and even engaging in spots, but for the most part it will remind the first listeners of a dyspeptic after dinner speaker talking through an electrical storm into a TV set with a faulty tube.

Presenting Jaime Laredo (RCA Victor Stereo). The youngest violinist ever to win Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Concours (TIME, June 15) demonstrates how he did it in a first recording of assorted display pieces: Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 2 in A, Falla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole, Paganini’s Caprice No. 13 in B-Flat. The trick, it would seem, is to have a plumply purling tone, a boldly bravura manner and the kind of musical sensibility that kindles fires in the weariest repertory chargers.

Ambrosian Chants (Choir of the Poli-fonica Ambrosiana, conducted by Monsignor Giuseppe Biella; Vox, 3 LPs). Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, is said to have devised the chant which bears his name near the end of the 4th century. Older than the Gregorian chant, the music has a water-clear simplicity, relieved at times by vocal tracery as gracefully twining as a rood screen.

Hugo Weisgall: The Tenor (Richard Cassilly, tenor; Richard Cross, bass-baritone; Westminster, 2 LPs). A deft one-act assault on the bravura pomposities of grand opera, as practiced by an addled tenor who believes he is as good a man in front of the footlights as he is behind them. The sweeping Straussian score is wiry with irony and wit.