"Ah-ca-PELL-a"

As anybody knows who has ever played the game, musical one-upmanship requires the gall of a party-crasher, the guile of a tax consultant, and the memory of an IBM machine. The winning player must know what musical names to drop at the right time: if he is naive enough to mention Jean Sibelius just now, he is sure to lose points, while Gustav Mahler will get him a lot of mileage this season, and he will do well almost any year with the really unknown names (Karl Ditters von Dit-tersdorf) that make his opponents uneasy. But what separates the great player from the merely good one is his ability to pronounce names correctly that most people muff ("Loo-EE-jee Da-la-pee-CO-la"). To take the guesswork out of pronunciation, Grayhill Productions has now issued an LP recording that no serious player can afford to be without.

Titled Say It Right! (more properly, Say It Correctly), the disk provides pronunciation for the names of 202 composers, starting with Adolphe-Charles Adam ("Ah-DAHM") and ending with Eugene Ysaye ("OY-jen Ee-SI-ya"). It also includes 134 operas, 55 ballets, 47 tone poems and suites, 62 conductors, 61 instrumentalists, 72 singers, ten operatic and orchestral groups, and 161 musical terms. From this generous supply every player must, of course, select his own repertory of names. A good random beginner's list might include Hector Berlioz ("EC-tor BEAR-li-oss"), Emil Waldteufel ("VAAL-toy-ful"), Kurt Weill's Die Dreigrosch-enoper ("Dee Dry-GROSH-en-oper"), Puccini's Gianni Schicchi ("Johnny SKEE-ky"), Prokofiev's ballet, Chout ("Shoo!"), Conductor Eugen Jochum ("OY-gen YOK-hum"), Pianist Jorge Bo-let ("HOAR-hay Bo-LETT"). Advanced players will discover certain unaccountable omissions: where are Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda or Composers Karl Heinz Stockhausen and Max Wilhelm Karl Vogrich?

But for intermission use, Say It Right! should do just fine. There is no known countermove to the man who leans on the bar and remarks with impeccable diction that "Dargomijskian naturalism" in opera began to disappear with Rimsky-Korsa-kov's "Snay-ga-ROTCH-ka."

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