All taste abandon, you who listen here. The combination of some of the most banal music ever composed performed by one of the most vulgar men who ever conducted captured in some of the most vulgar sound ever recorded is enough to drive listeners with refined sensibilities to despair. But for less discriminating listeners, the disc called Rhapsodies by Leopold Stokowski on RCA Living Stereo will be just the thing to clear the air after too much Mozart and Schubert. Stokowski, whose grasp of the distinctions between good and ...
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All taste abandon, you who listen here. The combination of some of the most banal music ever composed performed by one of the most vulgar men who ever conducted captured in some of the most vulgar sound ever recorded is enough to drive listeners with refined sensibilities to despair. But for less discriminating listeners, the disc called Rhapsodies by Leopold Stokowski on RCA Living Stereo will be just the thing to clear the air after too much Mozart and Schubert. Stokowski, whose grasp of the distinctions between good and bad music has always been dubious, tears into Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody with unrestrained gusto, rips into Enescu's First Romanian Rhapsody with unreserved panache, jumps into Smetana's Moldau with both feet, and grabs hold of the Venusberg music following Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture with undisguised passion. The Symphony of the Air, RCA's studio orchestra of the late '50s and early '60s, plays with more power than polish and more color than control, but, since that was...
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