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BRITTEN: STRING QUARTET NO. 2 (London). Written to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, this quartet is an architectural tour de force, requiring four lone instruments to construct a stately musical monument. Britain's impressive Amadeus Quartet does the job with distinction.
MOZART: CLARINET QUINTET (London). Serenity and a sense of finality characterize the music Mozart wrote two years before his death. In this harmonious performance, strings and clarinet melt magically together as they trade melodies and take turns outlining the airy ornaments. Members of the Vienna Octet are the players, with Alfred Boskovsky the superb clarinetist.
GIAN FRANCESCO MALIPIERO: RISPETTI E STRAMBOTTI FOR STRING QUARTET (Nonesuch). The highly melodious, archaic music of the 82-year-old Italian composer too seldom gets a hearing. Abandoning formal movements, he has strung together 20 "stanzas" in celebration of old Italian poetry. He also celebrates the sound of strings, even reveling in what seem like tuning-up exercises. There is a contagious spontaneity in this reissue by the Stuyvesant Quartet, who on the other side play Hindemith's youthful and exuberant String Quartet No. 2.
HAYDN: QUARTETS OPUS 3, NO. 5; OPUS 33, NO. 2; OPUS 76, NO. 2 (London). A sampling from three periods of Haydn's music, mileposts in the early history of the string quartet. The earliest, nicknamed "The Serenade," sounds like party music played by strolling strings. "The Joke" is more serious; its nickname comes from Haydn's wager that the ladies would talk before the music ended. The last of the three shows Haydn at his richest and most complex. The members of the Janácek Quartet from Czechoslovakia play the works from memory, but they play as one.
PASTORALES (Columbia). Rustic airs of high spirits and low specific gravity that display the virtuosity of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. Mostly 20th century works, the eight pieces include a folksy fresh Walking Tune by Percy Grainger, a catchy early song by Stravinsky, and some skimmering sketches by Darius Milhaud.
WILLIAM WALTON: FAçADE (Decca). At the 1923 London première of Façade, Edith Sitwell read her poems, with their witty musical accompaniment by her young friend Walton, into the mouth of a mask painted on the curtain hiding her from view. Public and critics alike pronounced the evening an outrage. But the musical "entertainment" has been revived again and again, currently in this recording by Actress Hermione Gingold and Countertenor Russell Oberlin, with Thomas Dunn conducting the small chamber ensemble. Unfortunately for them, Dame Edith herself, with Peter Pears, has performed the work for London Records. Where Gingold dramatizes the poems, Sitwell chants her surrealistic lines like a hypnotist, sometimes at breakneck speed. "We sought to reach a country between music and poetry, like the border between waking and dreaming." Sir Osbert Sitwell has explained. Gingold and Oberlin are too wide-awake.
CINEMA
THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY. All the horror, humor and humanity of Brian Moore's novel are captured in this fine, sensitive film about a big Irish bruiser whose wife alone knows that he is really just a middle-aged child. Played to perfection by Robert Shaw and Mary Ure.