"...the point of this particular choice has more rationale than just the decided charm of the concerto. In 1984 thousands of Britishers were glued to their tellys for five weeks watching the BBC competition for Young Musician of the Year, and saw Miss Johnson win with this piece. "

Milt Jackson can play the vibraphone with such dexterity and speed that you are not aware that two simple hammers are the driving force of his sound.

Musicians of my acquaint­ance talked about Bartok, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg as though they were music's Holy Trinity. Today there are few musicians who deign to speak to me, but I somehow get the impression that, as an influence, Bartok has been re­moved from that lofty eminence.

Seeing the title of this record, I was a bit taken aback. I didn't know what to expect. One of those horsehair­stuffed sonatas by MacDowell? Some of those ickey-poo salon pieces by Ethelbert Nevin? It was difficult to guess at anything much later. Who knows the piano works by Howard Hanson or Roger Sessions? The com­plete piano music by Leonard Berns­tein and Irving Babbitt occupies an LP apiece, and Copland's just two. For a moment I wondered if anyone still writes piano music.

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"Some rattling good piano passages"? That is the crux of Mendelssohn's piano music."

Such information as one usually finds about the Quintet dwells on the fact that Simrock, Dvorak's publisher, without a by-your-leave, brought it out in 1888 as Op. 77, suggesting that it was a recent composition. It wasn't. Dvorak had written it 13 years earlier, when he was stripling of 34.

Robert Tear is a real artist. He has developed a formidable technique, which he uses to add marvelously subtle coloring to what he sings, and he knows exactly what he is singing about and wants you to understand it (i.e. he sings with both clarity and intelligence).

Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov is arguably the greatest and without argument the most controversial of Russian operas. Mussorgsky made several major revisions of his score before it was accepted for its first performances. Then after his death Rimsky­-Korsakov, in an attempt to salvage an opera he felt deserved a better reception than it had been given, made another wholesale revision and re-orchestration of his own.

In former times, if one met a slightly rumpled person puffing on a pipe, he was sure to be a professor. Tobacco pipes having been downgraded by restaurateurs, airline stewardesses, and the Surgeon General, you are more likely to meet a professor tootling meditatively on a musical pipe.

"Those who have been yearning for a recording of the complete piano sonatas of Felix Mendelssohn, unencumbered by other material, will breathe a sigh of relief."

There is an affecting and haunting charm to the piano music of Alexander Scriabin. Even in the briefest piece, there is an allurement drawing you into a maze which holds you long after the final cadence.