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More Maazel Puccini. Lorin Maazel, who recently added the Vienna State Opera to his list of music directorships, has added Le Villi to his list of recordings of Puccini operas for Columbia. Masterworks' inter national a&r director Paul Myers went abroad in October to supervise the final mix of the tapes. In the composer's first op era, Placido Domingo sings Robert and Renata Scotto his betrothed, Anna. Also featured is Tito Gobbi. The album is slated for release this spring. Is Maazel on the way to conducting all the Puccini operas for Columbia? It has been discussed, although there is nothing official. We certainly wouldn't be at all surprised. Meanwhile, Maazel has recorded Verdi's Luisa Miller for DG, in conjunction with a Covent Garden revival of the opera. The cast includes Domingo, Katia Riccia relli, Renato Bruson, Gwynne Howell, and Wladimiro Ganzarolli. RCA in England and Ireland. Although, as reported last month, RCA can celed its projected recording in London of Ponchielli's La Gioconda, it went ahead with Leontyne Price's latest recital disc. With Henry Lewis and the Philharmonia Orchestra she recorded a varied collection of arias, from Bellini ("Casta diva" from Norma) and Britten (Queen Elizabeth's monolog from Gloriana) to Weber ("Ozean, du Ungeheuer" from Oberon) and Wagner (the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde). Meanwhile, over in County Kildare, at St. Patrick's Seminary in Maynooth, James Galway, the flutist from Northern Ireland, teamed with the Irish Chamber Orchestra to record for RCA a collection of Stamitz concertos. He also joined violinist Kyung-Wha Chung in recordings of Bach's trio sonatas for the same company, the continuo being handled by harpsichordist Philip Moll and cellist Moray Welsh. Gal way's planned concert for Pope John Paul II had to be canceled when the pontiff's visit to Ireland ran behind schedule. New doings at Moss. While carrying on the Vox tradition of solid performances of a broad repertoire in inexpensive editions, the Moss Music Group is also rapidly developing its own line. The deluxe edition of Thea Musgrave's opera Mary, Queen of Scots, reviewed in this issue, signals one new direction. Soon to come is another deluxe four-disc package containing the six Schubert Masses in performances directed by Martin Behrmann. MMG is also entering the audiophile market with digitally re corded performances of the nine completed Mahler symphonies by Harold Farberman and the London Symphony Orchestra. The First and Fourth Symphonies were re corded in November, the Eighth will be re corded in May, and the others will follow apace. George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the man who created Vox and Turnabout, has functioned as an a&r consultant since the sale of the labels to Ira Moss, et al. Leonard Bernstein is suing the owner of a juke box in a Jackson Heights bar. Frederick Loewe is suing the owner of one in a Santa Monica restaurant. Pay the $8.00 already. Leonard Bern stein is suing the owner of a jukebox located in a bar in Jackson Heights. Frederick Loewe is suing the owner of one in a restaurant in Santa Monica. Rod Stewart is suing a fellow who has a jukebox in a pizza parlor in Litchfield, Illinois. And Bruce Springsteen is suing somebody who has one located in a waffle house in Charlotte, North Carolina. What's this all about? Actually, these court actions are among some three dozen lawsuits filed in the names of noted plaintiffs by the American Society of Com posers, Authors, and Publishers against jukebox operators who have allegedly not paid the $8.00 compulsory license fee specified in the new copyright law. ASCAP believes its members are losing perhaps as much as $3 million a year from unlicensed jukes and has started a crackdown campaign. Who's afraid of Thomas Wolfe? Apparently intent on disproving Thomas Wolfe's dictum, Peter Munves is going "home" again. One of Simon Schmidt's first steps as the new head of CBS Master works was to bring Munves back into the CBS fold as a special marketing consultant. Munves' reputation as a marketing wizard got its start at Columbia, where he applied the "greatest hits" format to the marketing of classical recordings. His subsequent innovations at RCA and Pickwick (Quintessence) were equally adventuresome. Though it is still too early to foresee all the ramifications of the recent reorganization at CBS, one thing is certain: Peter Munves will again leave his mark. When he promises a "new look" in Masterworks marketing, that is no idle chatter. PBS Faust. On January 2 PBS will broadcast a Chicago Lyric Opera production of Gounod's Faust in celebration of the company's twenty-fifth anniversary season. The performance, taped last September, features Mirella Freni, Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Alfredo Kraus, with Georges Pretre conducting. Allelujah II! From both RCA and Columbia comes heartening news for the contemporary-music fancier. RCA is reissuing a recording (ARL 1-1674) of instrumental works of Luciano Berio: the Concerto for Two Pianos, Nones, and Allelujah II. Its first incarnation was all too brief it appeared in SCHWANN in January 1977 and disappeared in April 1978-but spectacular. As HIGH FIDELITY readers may re call, the concerto won the 1977 Koussevitzky International Recording Award, announced in December of that year. The reappearance of the recording now can only be seen as a victory for intrinsic worth over more conventional commercial considerations. For its part, Columbia is issuing the complete piano music of Aaron Copland in performances by Leo Smit. This is not the sort of project, any more than the Berio, that makes record companies rich; a $3,000 grant from the Ford Foundation helped make this one possible. Paul Robeson. Following the nation wide videocast of James Earl Jones's portrayal of the legendary American basso Paul Robeson, we received information from our longtime Berlin correspondent Paul Moor about a Paul Robeson Archive. It's not, we regret to say, in his native country, nor at London or Stratford-on-Avon, where he scored his greatest successes as singer and actor, but rather forms part of the Academy of the Arts in East Germany.
(High Fidelity, Jan. 1980) Also see: Classical Music Recordings Reviews
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