Music: Reincarnation

During the 1930s, most of the long-eared musical world was playing a waiting game. Famed Austrian Pianist Artur Schnabel was slowly recording his way through the Beethoven sonatas—Schnabel would no more hurry a recording session than he would a Beethoven tempo—and each new disk was an event. The whole series ranked as a masterpiece. Schnabel died in 1951, and his old 78 r.p.m. records soon became obsolete in the LP age. Last week Victor brought him back in his finest reincarnation, a package containing all 32 sonatas on 13 LPs, plus Schnabel's own meticulous edition of the piano scores. It is...