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LINCOLN CENTER: STAGE 5 "Five Ballets of the Five Senses." Choreographer John Butler joins with Composers Robert Starer, Benjamin Lees, Gunther Schuller, Eric Siday and Folk Singer Leon Bibb to examine in musical and dance terms -the five senses. These original works commissioned for television are: Taste of Sorrow, Scent of Flight, Touch of Loss, Sound of Fear, Sight of Beginning.
NET JOURNAL (on most stations Monday at 9 p.m.). "A Conversation with Svetlana Alliluyeva" is a live interview conducted by Paul Niven on the publication date of her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend.
RECORDS
Instrumental
MOZART: FOUR HORN CONCERTOS (RCA Victor). The hearty, lumbering call of a horn against the dancing humor of Mozart's strings make these concertos a cheery hour of music. Mozart himself was struck by the gaiety of the scores, and wrote such teasing cracks in the margins as "Courage!", "Take a Breath Here!", "Thank Heaven, It's Over!" The jokes aside, Alan Civil's well-controlled French horn playing makes the finales anything but welcome.
JOSEF SUK: VIRTUOSO VIOLIN MUSIC (Epic). This is the sort of violin music most often heard in seedy hotel restaurants featuring potted palms and rubbery veal. The pieces themselves are good enough music, but somehow the worst fiddlers choose to scratch and sob out Kreisler's Caprice Viennois, Benjamin's Jamaican Rhumba, Prokofiev's FBI in Peace and War (actually titled March from "The Love for Three Oranges"), and the omnipresent Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair. Czech Virtuoso Josef Suk has a deft touch, but even he invokes an occasional swoop and swoon.
RUBINSTEIN AND THE GUARNERI QUARTET:
BRAHMS'S PIANO QUINTET IN F MINOR (RCA Victor). Although Brahms was a piano virtuoso early in his career, his compositions usually require more sensitivity than showmanship. Artur Rubinstein, who is famous for his flashing dexterity, here demonstrates his depth of intellect, while the young Guarneri Quartet matches the master in adorning Brahms's introspective and gentle work.
ISAAC STERN: LALO'S SYMPHONIE ESPAGNOLE and BRUCH'S VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 1 (Columbia). Those 19th century French composers who mated their music to Spanish idioms often produced exciting masterpieces—fleshing out the gaunt bones of Spanish rhythms with lovely orchestral colors. Lalo completed his Spanish Symphony in 1873, only two years before Bizet finished Carmen, and Lalo's work was an apt augury of that most popular opera. Isaac Stern's violin and Eugene Ormandy's Philadelphia orchestra join in a most pleasing album.
GRANADOS: GOYESCAS, ESCENAS ROMANTICAS, EL PELELE (2 LPs; Epic). Enrique Granados y Campina named his Goyescas after one of his favorite painters, lavishing the color and romanticism of old melodic Spanish fandangos and jotas on his sometimes morbid, more often gay suites. Pianist Alicia de Larrocha displays thorough understanding of her compatriot's music, which Granados later transformed into an opera of the same name. The opera received a mild welcome at the Metropolitan in 1916, only three months before the composer burned to death during a German torpedo attack on his homeward-bound ship.