The Pavarotti Edition.
Volume One: Operatic Arias by Donizetti. Volume Two: Operatic Arias by Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi. Volume Three: Operatic Arias by Verdi. Volume Four: Operatic Arias by Verdi. Volume Five: Operatic Arias by Puccini. Volume Six: Operatic Arias by Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo. Volume Seven: Arias by Scarlatti, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Rossini. Volume Eight: Arias by Gounod, Meyerbeer, Ponchielli, Bizet, Massenet, Mascagni, Cilea, Puccini. Volume Nine: Italian Songs by various composers. Volume Ten: Italian Popular Songs. Luciano Pavarotti, tenor; various assisting artists, conductors and orchestras. Original producers and engineers unlisted. Paul Moseley, concept and compilation. Decca 470001-0010 (10 CDs)

At 66, Luciano Pavarotti, the most popular operatic tenor since Caruso, is still raking it in-top price for a recent Shanghai concert was $720 a pop. Such are the rewards of being an international personality. Before becoming a bloated money machine, Pavarotti was a universally admired opera star and prolific recording artist, the subject of Decca's The Pavarotti Edition, a ten-disc boxed album with a lavish booklet of photos and a bonus disc replicating his first British 45rpm Extended Play record. It's a handsome retrospective look at a remarkable career, providing plenty of ammunition to his fans and detractors.

How good was he? From the evidence of these records he was very good indeed, but the evidence also suggests that his popularity stems from his outsized personality. Other tenors were more versatile, had more mellifluous voices, were more idiomatic, stylish interpreters, and had tonal resources beyond those at Pavarotti's command.

Marketing hype helped sustain his successful career. Decca billed him as "King of the High Cs," PBS pushed him as a fund-raising phenomenon. The latter-day Pavarotti, grown gross, used his bulk, toothy smile, blanket-sized handkerchief, and sweaty brow to project a unique image. In fact, that handkerchief and the sweat help explain his success-audiences feel he's giving his all, working his heart out for them. And he is. Turn to almost every track on these discs, and you get an inkling of that appeal-this man enjoys what he does and communicates that joy. Many singers enjoy performing; few can fling that enjoyment across the footlights.

Best of all, Pavarotti's voice is readily identifiable, one note or so and you know it's Pavarotti, not yet another faceless, assembly-line tenor. From his very first 1964 Decca release, we hear a voice that's individual in character, suffused with bright, sunlit colors, even from top to bottom, with a plush-toned middle and a ringing top. Ah, that top. There's a trumpet-like resonance to his high notes, undeniably thrilling in the opera house, but exaggerated on records, where its penetrating clarion calls can wear you down.

Allied to that brassy top is his energy. Every track on this set bursts with energy, even when it's inappropriate, which is most of the time, especially when he's singing bel canto arias that cry out for the grace and elegance sorely absent from his interpretive arsenal. And Pavarotti doesn't do tender; lyric tenors are stage lovers, with big arias calling for caressing, tender tones-but his trumpet sounds. In the lovely "Quando le sere" from Verdi's Luisa Miller, he starts out full-voiced and has nowhere to go but more bellowing for the aria's climax. He often tries to lighten his voice, but the muscular approach wins; try his martial "Che gelida manina," from Puccini's La boheme to hear what I mean. Inside Pavarotti's lyric tenor is a spinto tenor trying to burst out. But there's a positive side to all that energy, as we hear in his famous recording of "Ah! mes amis" from Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment, and the way he launches, rocket-like, into those spectacular nine high Cs in the cabaletta. Elsewhere, those highs remain exciting, but often they're like shrieks in the night, missiles from nowhere, existing for themselves alone. Impressive, but crude.

So The Pavarotti Edition has no surprises. If you love him, you'll want this well-selected, well-recorded 13 hours of his singing. If you're just curious, wait for single-disc releases from the set and go for the earlier ones-unless you're after a party record and need Volume 7 with its laughable Gluck and Mozart arias. Me? I found nothing to change my mind. His earliest recordings are his best. By 1980 or so, the trumpet blasts dominated, the vocal tics became mannerisms, the interpretations coarsened. Today, he's a caricature of his younger self. But even as I admire many of the younger Pavarotti's recordings, I hear in them the stylistic flaws that prevent the whole-hearted embrace I'll reserve for his betters.

- Dan Davis

Ben Heppner: Airs Français.
London Symphony Orchestra, London Voices, Myung-Whun Chung, conductor. Christopher Alder, producer; Wolf-Dieter Karwatky and Reinhard Lagemann, engineers. Deutsche Grammophon 289 471 372

This collection, which would challenge any singer, represents a new direction for tenor Ben Heppner. Best known for his Wagner roles, Heppner sang Berlioz' Les Troyens in London and was inspired to make this CD, devoted to the music of Berlioz, Massenet, and Meyerbeer. He had to learn many of the pieces from scratch.

Highlights include "O Souverain," from Massen-et's Le Cid, an impassioned and thrilling aria that Heppner sings in exactly that vein, with dramatic crescendos and ringing high notes. He recorded this once before, in 1993-94 [Great Tenor Arias, RCA 62504]. Familiarity lends added poise to this later version, which achieves a more satisfying musical result while sounding less deliberate and effortful. It's successful enough to invite a comparison with the great French tenor Georges Thill (1897-1984). Thill's voice was characterized by a brilliant quality, with more open vowels than Heppner's, and a more authentic lyrical aspect. Although Thill's account of this aria (on Airs d'Op?ras Fran?ais, EMI 69548) is more perfectly French, Heppner is close to the mark, and it's hard to imagine anyone doing it better today.

Similarly, Heppner's exciting version of "Rachel, Quand du Seigneur," a highly dramatic aria from Halevy's little-known opera La Juive, brings to mind another great singer of the past, Enrico Caruso (whose recording of this is in The Legendary Enrico Caruso, RCA 5911). As with Thill, Caruso's slightly more open-sounding version makes for exciting listening, but Heppner's is vocally and dramatically insightful, and includes the thrilling and very difficult cabaletta that Caruso overlooks. It's not easy for a big voice like Heppner's to negotiate the twists and turns of this rapid-fire piece, but he manages it with aplomb, scaling down his voice without sounding bottled-up.

My only complaint about Heppner's singing is his occasional tendency to go for too broad a dynamic or textural range, producing crooned pianissimi or overly compressed and pinched-sounding high notes, which are gloriously open elsewhere. Although Heppner can sing the heroic French repertoire quite well, smaller fare requires the classic lyric sound of someone like Roberto Alagna (or, indeed, Thill himself). But that's nit-picking. The heroic stuff and the many successfully sung lyric passages are well worth the price of admission. Don't buy it for the sound, though. You can hear the voice and solo instruments fairly well, but everything else is pretty much a wash. It's hard to pinpoint anything in the orchestra, though it's clear that the chorus is standing behind them!

- John Higgins

Sarah Brightman: Classics.
London Symphony Orchestra; Royal Philharmonic; English National Orchestra; Prague Symphony Orchestra; various choruses; Paul Bateman and Mike Reed, conductors. Frank Peterson, producer; Michael Soltau, et al., engineers. Angel 33257

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The program listing on Classics specifies that a number of recordings on this "greatest hits" CD are "new." Looking at the photos in the jacket, one might think this is a misprint for "nude," since Brightman appears so scantily clad. Perhaps the booklet centerfold was meant to sell this recording on the beauty of the artist's navel, for one can scarcely recommend purchasing it as an example of good singing. The ex-Mrs. Andrew Lloyd-Webber made a big splash in Phantom of the Opera, and once freed from her ties to that show and its composer, pursued a curious, mystical career as high priestess of crossover schlock. Never mind that she has a horrible wobble in her vocal delivery, swoops in on notes like a hawk on a pigeon, or has only rudimentary knowledge of foreign languages. This is not good show-music singing or good opera singing. It isn't good singing, period.

But Brightman holds court nonetheless, and many stand in line and pay dearly to hear her. Those people will love this album; most others will want to use it as a stove-burner liner, not wishing to hear Brightman slice and dice such great music as "O Mio Babbino Caro," Schubert's Ave Maria, Albinoni's Adagio (here called "Anytime Anywhere"), or, God forbid, "Nessun Dorma." In spite of a long list of engineers, the selections all sound like they were recorded in the catacombs of Rome. Huge echo, pulsing drum tracks, and pounding bass all add up to a sound that can only be described as "unclean." Still curious? Well, you know what curiosity did to the cat. Listen at your own risk.

- Rad Bennett

Barber: Violin Concerto.
Souvenirs. Serenade. Music for a Scene from Shelley. James Buswell, violin. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Marin Alsop, conductor. Andrew Walton, producer; Tony Faulkner, engineer. Naxos 8.559044

Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto is one of the glories of international violin literature, aglow with fresh, rapturous lyricism and once-heard-never-forgotten melodies that make one breathe more deeply and remember, with a sigh of wistful fondness, the passionate follies of one's spent youth. There have been many recordings since the concerto was premiered in 1939. I've heard most of them and for this review compared one after another. No one quite matches the classic Isaac Stern/Leonard Bernstein collaboration [Sony 64506] of three decades ago-not because other violinists haven't equaled Stern's playing, but because Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic are so inspired. In no other version are those grand, gorgeous, swelling climaxes shaped with such erotic fervor and swept forward with such ecstatic release. The Stern/Bernstein is magnificently engineered, too. The string choirs are velvety rich, yet the recording is judiciously balanced and wonderfully detailed; note, for instance, how clearly the silvery touches of piano, used here as an orchestral instrument, emerge from Barber's finely woven textures. Stern/Bernstein's closest rival-and my favorite "alternate" performance-is Hilary Hahn with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra led by Hugh Wolff [Sony 89029]. This version, though it lacks the fullness and imposing power of Bernstein's larger orchestra, has a pristine sweetness and warmth all its own, and Hahn is splendid throughout. In the short, final presto she surpasses every other soloist with the fire and cut-glass brilliance of her (giddily fast) playing.

All this is not to say that James Buswell and the Royal Scots under Marin Alsop don't do a fine job with the Concerto too, and if the competition weren't so fierce, theirs might well be a first choice. Whatever you do, if by some chance you don't know this great Romantic concerto, bestir yourself and soon. If you'd like to get three worthy bonuses-Barber's seldom-recorded Souvenirs, with its elegant, faintly mocking ballroom dances (waltz, schottische, tango, gallop), his glowering Music from a Scene from Shelley, and his early (Opus 1), chastely amiable Serenade for strings-this Naxos compilation may indeed be your choice. The recording has plenty of punch, though it's not the last word in refinement. The strings (including the soloist) are just a tad grainy, the orchestra not always in sharp focus, and the soundstage a little flattened-all minor deficiencies more noticeable when compared to the better-sounding Sonys described above.

- Mark Lehman

Walton: Five Bagatelles for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra.
Arnold: Serenade for Guitar and Strings. Guitar Concerto. Berkeley: Guitar Concerto. Craig Ogden, guitar. Northern Sinfonia, Richard Hickox, conductor. Ralph Couzens, producer; Jonathan Cooper, engineer. Chandos 9963

Really good un-Spanish guitar concertos are rarer than hen's teeth. But this new Chandos anthology of "English Guitar Concertos" offers two (along with a lesser compatriot) on one disc: Malcolm Arnold's, from 1959, and William Walton's Five Bagatelles, from 1971, originally for solo guitar but here in a scintillating reincarnation for guitar and chamber orchestra.

Don't be fooled by the unassuming title. Walton's 18-minute cycle, though it plumbs no emotional depths and freely admits indebtedness to various kinds of popular music, shows off this composer's characteristic interplay of nervous rhythmic tension and sensual, sun-drenched Mediterranean color (Walton lived on the Italian island of Ischia during his later years) to best advantage. Indeed, this is one of Walton's most appealing works: electric with energy, immaculately crafted, and packed with catchy and alluring tunes, whether jagged and incisive (as in the opening allegro assai and concluding presto con slancio) or enchanting and sultry (in the lilting central alla cubana and the two dreamy lentos that surround it). And how idiomatic yet imaginative Walton's guitar writing is! Those thrilling bravura roulades, those florid coloratura arias, those bittersweet harmonies, those gracile ornaments-everything lies so easily on this difficult instrument, nothing is forced or unnatural, yet there's no resort to threadbare "flamenco" figurations. Somehow Walton makes the guitar his own; no surprise his Five Bagatelles has become a mainstay for guitarists and audiences around the world.

Arnold's Concerto is also one of its composer's most successful and individual creations. It is replete with indelible melodies, like the swaying, irresistible second theme in the opening allegro so niftily set off by those comically honking winds. In the unforgettable (and quite extended) slow movement, a tribute to the great Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, Arnold explores darker and stranger territory. Slinky and bluesy but also mocking, menacing, and even, toward the end, spectral and phantasmagoric, this haunted lento, with its forlorn, sighing glissandos, is the least conventional of musical elegies. Its spell lingers long after the Concerto's merrily dancing rondo finale.

Australian-born, world-class virtuoso Craig Ogden fills out his ambitious program with Arnold's brief Serenade for Guitar and Strings—a pleasant trifle—and Lennox Berkeley's Concerto, which begins well with a premonitory, Brittenesque horn fanfare, but quickly subsides into genteel, perfectly respectable meandering that never quite gels into anything memorable. Ogden plays with intelligence and flaw-less technique-he doesn't even squeak-and is ably partnered by Richard Hickox and the Northern Sinfonia. Both concertos and Walton's Bagatelles (in the solo version) have been superbly recorded before, for RCA, on separate releases—the Arnold Concerto on an outstanding vintage stereo "Shaded Dog"—by Julian Bream, who commissioned and premiered them. These new digital-age recordings by Chandos are dynamic, spacious, and detailed, with an appropriately up-close perspective on the soloist.

- Mark Lehman

Stravinsky: Suite: L'Histoire du Soldat.
Octet for Wind Instruments. Pribaoutki, for soprano and eight instruments. Fanfare for a New Theater. Lied ohne Name, for two bassoons. Pastorale, for violin and winds. Tango, for violin and piano.* How the Mushrooms Went to War, for bass voice and piano.* La Marseillaise, arranged for solo violin. Petit Ramusianum Harmonique, for baritone voice.* Mark Peskanov, violin; Lucy Shelton, soprano; Martin Bruns, baritone; Mikhail Svetlov, bass; Doris Stevenson, piano. Harmonie Ensemble/New York, Steven Richman, conductor and producer. Silas Brown and Ben Rizzi, engineers. KOCH International Classics CD 3-7438

I first came across Steven Richman's Harmonie Ensemble/ New York in 1990 when my Fanfare editor sent me Salute to France [Music & Arts CD-649]: delightful, nicely recorded performances of uncelebrated treats by Reynaldo Hahn, Darius Milhaud, and Jacques Ibert, along with Francis Poulenc's Aubade for Piano and 18 Instruments. Richman's thing is good music too long in the shadows leavened by better-known fare, e.g., the Poulenc. His passion for Dvor?k and Gershwin are stories for another fireside.

In keeping with his mandate ("Premieres and Rarities"), Richman's present CD does its level best; I've asterisked the firsts above. In the widely recorded L'Histoire suite (the version without narration), he goes head to head with heavy hitters; ditto for the Octet. Pribaoutki and Pastorale take us into a terrain better known to stone discophiles. The New York metropolitan area is home to some of the world's best instrumentalists, and Richman's gang is top-shelf, as are the vocalists and pianist. (Harmonie refers to a wind ensemble, alone or as part of a larger group.)

There's a consistency to Richman's interpretations. If you're familiar with the jewel-like Octet, you'll probably agree that you've heard edgier readings. Richman's judicious dabs of cr?me fra?che make this my favorite. The listener might prefer a more sharply contoured L'Histoire, though the one to hand is certainly frisky where it needs to be. It really is a question of taste. Again, the ensemble sparkles. The remainder of the program will not disappoint, beginning with the spooky-modal Pribaoutki of 1914, the year following the premiere of the culture-busting Sacre. Nicely recorded with a touch more "shine" than I'd have liked, but that too is a question of taste.

- Mike Silverton

Feldman: String Quartet (II).
Members of the Ives Ensemble: Josje Ter Haar, Janneke Van Prooijen, violins; Ruben Sanderse, viola; Job Ter Haar, cello. Hessian Radio, Frankfurt, and Hat Hut Records, coproducers; Thomas Eschler, engineer. hat[now]ART 4-144 (4 CDs)

Hat Hut Records' sixteenth release in its Morton Feld-man survey (not counting a re-release) stands as a milestone for two solid reasons. One, given the state of art music on disc, never mind modernist art music, is the survey itself. The other addresses improbability. That this recording of String Quartet (II) exists I count as a wonder. The luminously beautiful German-Swiss co-production clocks in at near five hours. A performance can take six. As a concession to New York School indeterminacy, Feldman permits players latitude in tempi. Elastic durations apart, his mature period's notation is as precise as it sounds. A disdain of brevity speaks for itself. Feldman's mastery of color and texture is yet another wonder. His interest in Turkish carpets with their deviations within repeating patterns finds consonance in the music: Seemingly repetitious, harmonically translucent passages go their unhurried, mutating way. Feldman befriended painters, chiefmost among them Philip Guston, with whom relations cooled when Guston abandoned abstraction for representational imagery. Poet Frank O'Hara quotes the composer as saying, "[T]he use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas." What one would normally take for a simile approaches a literal truth. String Quartet (II) exemplifies as forcefully as anything in Feldman's oeuvre the composer's fealty to abstraction, the effect of which has this listener hip-deep in synaesthesia: painting for the ear. Painters of the modernist period restored the canvas to a two-dimensional surface. Feldman, as an astonishment, does it with sound. (See Andy Quint on synaesthesia, Issue 113.)

To characterize the least figurative music I know, I offer a gentle dragon, a beneficent, insubstantial Fafner, say, whom that bumptious lout, Siegfried, declines to slay but rather coddles, so charming are the organ-like sounds emitting from the dozing monster's nostrils: inhalation, exhalation; inhalation, exhalation-on and on but never the same. In a frail metaphor's embrace, I hear String Quartet (II)'s moments of relative excitation as REM sleep. These four string players of the Netherlands-based Ives Ensemble sound to me beyond cavil. (An opportunity on recording for comparison will happen when I levitate.) The sonics are likewise ideal: intimate, airy, resolved to a T. Never mind annual—a Recording for the Decade! (Blushing addendum-a little self-mockery's good for the soul. I'm not levitating, but Brian Brandt's Mode Records is soon to issue the six-hour stint by New York's Flux Quartet. I got the news soon after I submitted the above.)

- Mike Silverton

Williams: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
John Williams, producer; Simon Rhodes, engineer. Warner Sunset 8349 Williams: A.I. Barbara Bonney, soprano. John Williams, producer; Shawn Murphy, engineer. Warner Sunset 948096 (CD); Warner Sunset 948096 (DVD-Audio)

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has spawned a surprising amount of controversy among non-musical film critics. Their principal objection is that the movie is overscored with intrusive music. My first response was to wonder what these critics would have thought of Erich Korngold's assertive scoring style. No question: There is a lot of music in Harry Potter, and it is mixed loudly on the soundtrack. This is presumably the director's decision. In an intimate, dialog-driven drama, it could certainly be intrusive. But Chris Columbus evidently felt that Harry Potter was more dependent on its visuals than its dialog, and the film is virtually choreographed to John Williams' music. This effectively provides the seamless stylistic cohesiveness that is the key to the movie's success, as evidenced by the spellbound response of theaters full of children during its 150-minute length. Some have correctly observed that Williams emphasized the magic but missed the humanity of the book-but he is working with Columbus's directorial stance.

Williams has composed over 140 minutes of purely orchestral music, mercifully free of popular songs, pan flutes, and whining New Age Enyaisms. Approximately half the score is included on the CD. Williams has also arranged the principal themes into a nine-movement Concert Suite, designed for children in the tradition of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. The score, in general, and the fully developed version of "Hedwig's Theme," in particular, function as a theme and variations. In "The Face of Voldemort," Williams ingeniously juxtaposes "Hedwig's Theme" against an ominous motif that is actually a malignant sounding reduction of the theme to its three basic structural notes. Nevertheless, Harry Potter cannot be ranked with Williams' greatest scores. Aside from a few interesting orchestral touches (such as a duet for harp and bassoon), there is nothing new. As a pure listening experience, the relentless melodies and hyperactive music may not wear well. The complete score, with more atmospheric music mixed with the thematic highlights, would actually play better. Still, there is no other film composer alive capable of creating such a complex piece of pure orchestral music.

Those who complain that Williams is reprising past scores need to hear A.I. Though the film received a wide variety of reviews, ranging from vitriolic attacks to extravagant praise, Spielberg managed to make a challenging adult film that successfully rendered homage to Stanley Kubrick's style. It is easy to see why this flawed but fascinating effort turned many people off-however unfortunate in this numbingly barren year for serious film.

Having produced such a consistently high level of music over the past 25 years, Williams is sometimes taken for granted by critics, or generates unattainable expectations among film-music fans. Such was the case with Harry Potter. Initially, A.I. left me a little cold, but this score requires multiple hearings before revealing all its complexities. This emotionally involving, post-Romantic music combines modernist minimalism with electronic sonorities flawlessly integrated with the orchestra. The haunting principal theme is presented twice in its complete form: once for solo piano, once as a vocalise ravishingly sung by Barbara Bonney. Two pop vocal versions that did not appear in the film are clearly added for commercial reasons-program them out to avoid destroying the tone of the score.

There are passing nods to Reich and Gorecki, but in the final analysis, there seems to be no limit to Williams' inspiration. The cold gray of the intertwining Shostakovichian string lines of "Cybertronics," the offbeat, dissonant piano in "Rouge City," the bell sounds of "Hide and Seek," the mechanical music of "The Mecha World," and the unsettling but intoxicating Close Encounters-like sonorities of "Replicas" are so far removed from the lyrical sadness of the main theme that you are not prepared for its ultimate effect. That theme is the most achingly beautiful music Williams has written since "E.T. and Me."

Harry Potter presents a conventional orchestra in a concert-hall environment. There are no jarring multimike effects. The high end lacks the lustrous sheen characteristic of Shawn Murphy's best Williams recordings, but that aside, Murphy has given A.I. a nearly perfect acoustic setting. He captures all the tonal colors in Williams' complex orchestral and electronic palette, and slightly spotlights Bonney's voice. The DVD-Audio version is the most effective multichannel orchestral recording I have heard. The orchestral, choral, and vocal effects envelop you in a mesmerizing musical environment.

Williams has had quite a year-the most memorable for one composer since Williams himself wrote Star Wars and Close Encounters. Harry Potter is a dazzling display of orchestral virtuosity, but A.I. takes us directly to the heart of his genius.

- Arthur B. Lintgen

Mahler: Nine Symphonies (complete)
Symphony No.10 (1st movement), Song Cycles. Various soloists & choruses. New York Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, and London Symphony Orchestras, Leonard Bernstein, conductor. Stereo. Digitally remastered. Sony 89499 (12 CDs)

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No serious music lover of the Baby Boomer generation needs to be reminded of the importance of Leonard Bernstein's original Mahler cycle, the first integral recording of the nine completed symphonies. I still have my boxed set, purchased from Sam Goody's in New York City the summer of 1968 when I was a journalism intern. I had no place to play the records that summer, but I could not afford to pass up Goody's substantial discount. Leather-bound, a gold medallion of the composer embossed on the spine, the set is still with me.

Do younger music lovers realize the seminal importance of these revelatory performances? Mahler's music was new to a whole generation of listeners, performed by a conductor uniquely suited to be its acolyte. Yes, as we are constantly reminded, Mahler symphonies were performed before Bernstein, by such as Walter, Klemperer, Horenstein, Reiner, Scherchen, Szell, and Ormandy. But excepting only Walter and possibly Horenstein, none of them made Mahler's music a personal mission, or any sort of mission at all.

What's more, before Bernstein, no single Mahler work was part of the standard repertoire. After Bernstein, Mahler cycles have almost displaced Beethoven cycles as means for conductors to demonstrate their seriousness as interpreters and orchestral technicians. Even conductors of Bernstein's generation were inspired. Does anyone believe that without his example we would have had cycles by Solti, Haitink, Kubelik, and Tennstedt, or that Karajan would have taken up the few Mahler symphonies he did?

And yet, despite subsequent cycles, including two more by Bernstein, the visionary gleam and gut-wrenching emotion of these performances retain their spellbinding power. You get an idea of just how Parnassian this cycle is when you consider that even its harshest critics still refer to it 30 years on. Love it or hate it, Bernstein's Mahler, like Toscanini's Beethoven or Beecham's Mozart, is a monument you can't just pretend isn't there. I would take Bernstein's apocalyptic Second, his transcendent Third, and his "blackness ten times black" Sixth over any recordings since. It has become a clich? to observe that the Eighth needs better reproduction than this, and it got a superb recording of a great performance by Klaus Tennstedt on EMI. But not even he manages the closing pages as magisterially as Bernstein does, in the unimprovable words of one critic, as "one cataclysmic curve of sound."

Sony's idea was evidently to put into one box all the Mahler Bernstein recorded for Columbia. So we get the Adagietto played at Robert Kennedy's funeral, Part I of the Eighth from the program that opened Lincoln Center, and both Kindertotenlieders (with Jennie Tourel and Janet Baker). But curiously missing are the London Symphony Second, recorded in Ely Cathedral, and the last three movements of the Second, sung in Hebrew, and performed on Mount Scopus in Israel following the Six Day War in 1967.

Also absent are the conductor's recital of Mahler's songs with Fisher-Dieskau, the Das Lied he recorded in Israel with Christa Ludwig and Rene Kollo, and the Wunderhorn songs with Ludwig and Walter Berry. But there's certainly enough here to leave no one feeling deprived, especially at the bargain $70 price. The 20-bit remastered transfers are in better sound than on previous issues, including some of the original vinyl.

My principal complaint has to do with Sony's skimpy booklet. Texts and translations for all vocal music are included, as is Bernstein's insightful essay, "Mahler: His Time Has Come." But nothing about the music, despite excellent notes in the LPs and in previous digital incarnations, notes that Sony must own, which probably means that the corporation just didn't want to print a bigger or an additional booklet. This is a serious omission when you consider the appeal the set has to young people acquiring Mahler for the first time. Although this shouldn't deter you from buying it, you might send a complaint Sony's way. Otherwise, the box actually costs less than any two or three symphonies alone at full price by newer conductors who don't lay a patch on Bernstein for imagination and insight, to say nothing of sheer inspiration. One of the greatest gramophone achievements of the past century.

- Paul Seydor