RECORDS
Close quarters
RODNEY MILNES
Miss Horne has of course sung Carmen quite memorably once before, on the sound-
track album of Carmen Jones. But this time she is respectably singing in French, making good use of the words and only occasionally in the Habafiera and Seguidilla over-employ- ing her remarkable chest register and indulg- ing in the sort of operatic vamping that is now outdated in this role. The card scene is nicely sustained at a very steady pace, which is more than can be said of the alarmingly leisurely Quintet (conductor Henry Lewis).
Michele Molese sings what there is of Jose's role—not much, though there is plenty of room on either side for his flower song— and a bright, clearly-focused voice is marred only by a tendency to get overwrought. This proves catching, and the Finale (from 'C'est toi' to the end) starts to go oft the rails with 'Tu ne m'aime [sob] non plus' and soon after gets quite out of hand, with Carmen and Jose snarling at each other like a brace of sex-mad wolves, a long, long way from the stark dignity of Bizet's tragedy.
I wager that Decca's latest sampler record was, following the pattern, called 'The World of Georg Solti' until that maestro caught sight of the repertoire and had it changed to the less personal Georg Solti conducts the World of the Great Classics (sPA 127). It offers just on an hour of extremely well- recorded music at the bargain price of 99p, the selection of which is indeed bizarre : a brisk canter through the first half of the Carmen prelude, in which that tune is threat- ened by well-intentioned over-phrasing, Glinka's Russian and Ludmilla given the full Lso double gloss, and two pieces that are surely quite conductor-proof and therefore hardly eligible for any self-respecting maestro's 'world'—the Polovtsian Dances and Respighi's dreary vulgarisation of Ros- sini, which may suit the cute infantilism of Massine's La Boutique 7antasque on stage, but is insupportable in cold recorded blood.
Oddly for a conductor noted most for his passion and drive, the most successful items here are the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony and Gluck's Dance of the Blessed Spirits, both played with restraint and sen- sitivity; but what seems to me to be Solti's besetting sin, pressing the music on just when it should ease off, is neatly demonstrated in the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.
It is difficult to write about Stockhausen without ending up in Pseuds' Corner, that graveyard of contemporary journalism. The fact that his music is virtually impossible to describe in words is a fair indication that he is dealing with pure sound and with effects and emotions that cannot be conveyed by any other means. So when faced with a new release on Vox /Candide of Kontakte, his work for electronic sound and piano and percussion (hence the title), I can only weakly echo Alec McCowan's don in The Philan- thropist : 'I liked it', and urge you to try for yourself. The sounds in this hectic thirty-five minute piece are consistently absorbing and, as with virtually all music, take on fresh shape and meaning at each hearing.
Stockhausen supervised and took part in this recording, and as if to show that his music is not all the same, he includes Refrain, a gentle elegy for three instrumentalists in which silence and reverberation are as sig- nificant as sound—it could scarcely be more different in mood. At an unpardonably lower level, Kontakte is just the job for showing off your stereo equipment : those gobbledy noises darting about the room at high speed are more vividly suggestive of movement than any number of trains going into tunnels or Grand Marches from Aida.
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