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BENJAMIN BRITTEN: THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE (London). A musical drama for church performance, Furnace is in some ways similar to Britten's successful Curlew River of 1964. It begins with a medieval plainsong chanted by a procession of monks and acolytes who are about to present a play within a play, the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The melodies swirl to ever higher tension through Britten's dissonances, filtered through the medieval mood as through a scrim. In this first recording, the instrumentation is sparse but effective, as are the pure voices of the acolytes floating above the deeper tones of the monks.
BERG: LULU (Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). Alban Berg's brutish, nasty masterpiece is just beginning to win the moderate popular following that Lulu's bloody brother, Wozzeck, has already earned. Lulu is the story of a beautiful prostitute with a heart of sulphur who causes the death of most of the men who love her. Lulu herself, in the company of a lesbian countess, meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper. The gutter theme of the tale is appropriately accompanied by raucous atonality and harsh song-speech—all of which provides the raw material for the prevalent but irrelevant moralizing, philosophizing and musical theorizing that Lulu lovers are prone to manufacture. The intelligent artistry of Soprano Evelyn Lear and Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, under Karl Böhm's conducting, helps to make this an authoritative recording of a strange, chilling opera.
HAYDN: THE CREATION (Columbia; 2 LPs). The aging, devout Haydn painted God's creation of heaven and earth as a dramatic event of the first magnitude, and that is the way Leonard Bernstein conducts it. The New York Philharmonic is actually the star of the performance, although the Camerata Singers and Soloists John Reardon, Alexander Young and Judith Raskin keep up the rapid pace and theatrical fireworks.
THE MUSIC OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, VOL. VIII (Columbia; 2 LPs). This close-to-the-last package in Columbia's Schoenberg series includes a first recording of the composer's only comic opera, Von Heute auf Morgen. The complex twelve-tone style is perhaps unsuitable to the simple domestic plot: a husband strays toward a worldly woman, is won back by the artifices of his wife. The rich polyphony and varied textures of orchestra and voices provide a musical experience far beyond the promise of the uninspired libretto. Erika Schmidt is the wife, Derrik Olsen the husband, and Heather Harper the friend.
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick deploys all the dazzling trappings of the space age in an exciting, often demanding parable of the history and future of man.
HUNGER. This Swedish tale of a writer on the skids in a big city is given depth and resonance by the performances of Per Oscarsson and Gunnel Lindblom.
ISABEL. Under the direction of Husband Paul Almond, Geneviève Bujold generates an air of adolescent terror in this chilling ale of a young girl growing rapidly to womanhood while plagued by the ghosts of another life.
ROSEMARY'S BABY. Devil worship in Manhattan and other incidental naughtiness are given loving attention by Director Roman Polanski and Actress Mia Farrow in this sometimes too faithful adaptation of Ira Levin's bestseller.