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The Tape Deck: R. D. Darrell Expensive reels, budget cassette packaging ... Zarathustra in St. Louis by R. D. Darrell Rolls-Royce reels ... As every audiophile now sadly knows, the great early expectations of recorded tape's be coming the ne plus ultra medium for home listening were never realized. From the first, manufacturers have been unimaginatively content to accept disc quantity and quality limitations. A pioneering attempt to exploit at least the full technical potentials of open-reel taping wasn't made until last year in a superb quadriphonic test tape and several brief piano recitals from Ambiphon Records, 1 Riverdale Avenue, Bronx, New York 10463. Now Ambiphon is back with the first of a series of more musically re warding releases, this one starring the astonishingly magisterial seventeen year-old guitarist Michael Newman. On the Q-reel I've heard (QR 7502A) the youngster has the guts-and the skill-to challenge even the great Julian Bream in Britten's Op. 70 Nocturnal Variations, the Villa-Lobos Prelude No. 2, and a Dowland fantasia. This 23- minute recital is preceded by those invaluable 4 1/2-minute test and alignment materials, as is the companion recording of works by Narvaez, Mudarra, Frescobaldi, Sor, and Villa Lobos (QR 7502). The programs are combined on the 101 / 2- inch metal Q reel QR 10-7502 and on the normal size stereo-only reel SR 7502. All are deluxe processings, duplicated at one to-one rather than high speed (which does make a tremendous technical difference). The prices are correspondingly impressive: $19.95 for each of the shorter Q-reels and the stereo reel; $34.95 for the big professional size Q-reel. But apparently there are both pro demonstrators and audiophile perfectionists who are confident of getting their money's worth here! ... And economy cassette packaging. Manufacturers seem more economy conscious-for themselves, of course, rather than their customers. Although it wasn't so long ago that RCA raised the price of its cassettes, it now begins to abandon the standard plastic "jewel box" packaging in favor of a thinner, paper- hinged, cardboard box. Well, at least it looks attractive, saves space, and has none of the disadvantages of Ampex's unsatisfactory plastic slipcases. The first newly boxed RCA Red Seal cassette I've played is ARK 1 1155, $7.95, the anticipated debut recording of Avery Fisher award-winning cellist Lynn Harrell, backed by the London Symphony under James Levine in the Dvorák cello concerto. Both solo and orchestral playing are authoritatively adept, and the richly substantial recording matches that of Levine's recent Mahler First Sym phony. But the interpretative approach is self-consciously neo-Romantic in its exaggerated tempo and dynamic contrasts and often heart on-sleeve expressiveness. The rather disconcerting nature of this reading by such young virtuosos is heightened by comparison with the simultaneously released reading by the Canadian-born Zara Nelsova, famous back in the early Fifties as Ernest Bloch's choice as soloist in his own London recording of Schelomo and for an earlier version of the Dvorák concerto with Krips. Here, some twenty-five years later, she is playing (with the St. Louis Symphony under Susskind) with more verve and irresistible relish than ever, projecting a personal warmth that makes Harrell seem lacking in conviction. In this in comparable music the Casals/Szell (Seraphim mono) and Fournier/Szell (DG) disc-only versions remain supreme, but for both glowing enthusiasm and exultant songfulness Nel soya wins a place all her own (SMG Vox 8T/CT 152, eight-track cartridge/ Dolby-B cassette, $5.98 each). Sunny childhood/Celtic twilight evocations. Good as the whole Boulez/Columbia Ravel series has been and will be, Vol. 3 has outstanding, markedly contrasting appeals. Its complete Ma Mère l'Oye ballet is a paradigm of Gallic elegance and while its dramatically different La Valse is one of the most exciting I've ever heard. This may not be the most tenderly magical Mother Goose, and last month's Skrowaczewski Valse for SMG-Vox is more sensuously impressionistic, but these Boulez versions are both extraordinarily revelatory performances and-in gleaming, airborne, unexaggeratedly panoramic quadriphony- truly representative of today's state of the audio art: Columbia MAQ 32838, Dolby- B Q-8 cartridge, $7.98. Sir Arnold Bax may not be even a recognizable name to young American listeners, but veteran discophiles fondly remember his evocative tone poems Tintagel and The Garden of Fand. Dated and eclectic as they may be, they remain fascinating examples of romantic impressionism with a British accent. These two works, plus a more Delian/Sibelian Northern Bal lad No. 1 and the catchy proms/pops encore piece Mediterranean, are most welcome to the tape repertory, especially in the fine 1972 Lyrita recording of Sir Adrian Boult's loving performances with the London Philharmonic: Musical Heritage MHC 2120, Dolby-B cassette, $6.95 ( from the Musical Heritage Society, 1991 Broadway, New York, New York 10023). Zarathustra in St. Louis. What Walter Susskind has made of the St. Louis Symphony, evident in the Dvorák cello concerto with Nelsova, is overwhelmingly demonstrated in their powerfully, expansively played and recorded Strauss Also sprach Zarathustra: SMG-Vox CT/8T 145, Dolby B cassette/eight-track cartridge, $5.98 each. This is a more conservative Germanic, darkly portentous, weightily dramatic treatment than Haitink's more poetically eloquent 1974 Philips version (my personal favorite), but for many listeners Susskind's well may seem more satisfactorily "Straussian." Sonically it is first-rate even in stereo only. (The disc edition is QS encoded.) Beethoven piano-concerto cornucopias. As knowledgeable collectors might expect, there's no real challenge to the pre-eminence of the Ashke nazy/Solti Beethoven Five on Lon don-or even to the no-longer-on-tape Fleisher/Szell Columbia ( formerly Epic) series- by either the Prestige Box set from Wilhelm Kempff with the Berlin Philharmonic under Leitner (DG 3371 010, three Dolby-B cassettes, $23.94) or from Alfred Brendel with various nondescript orchestras con ducted by Buttcher, Wallberg, and Mehta (Classical Cassette Club CCC 17 and 4, two Dolby-B double-play cassettes, $5.95 each). But these sets should magnetically attract their soloists' aficionados, and each represents distinctively individual appeals: Kempff's in older, Romantic, North German traditions; Brendel's in more genially engaging Viennese vein. The robustly weighty 1962 DG recordings are admirably processed; yet the CCC processings are even more noteworthy both in doing better justice to the 1962-67 Vox/Turnabout master tapes than the original disc editions and in getting onto only two cassettes-running over 103 and 95 minutes, respectively-all five concertos plus three Beethovenian fillers. ------------- (High Fidelity, Jan. 1976) Also see: Marantz Stereo Cassette Decks (ad)
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