The Convenient Omnibus

Record collectors have long been accustomed to a one-sided search for one particular piece in a maze of two-faced records. Is that Mozart's 40th on the flip side of Haydn's 88th? Is Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata on the other side of the Schumann Piano Concerto? Now this petty but annoying problem is all but solved. More and more companies are offering omnibus collections of great composers in one volume, uniformly boxed and carefully indexed.

Leonard Bernstein: Beethoven's Nine Symphonies (8 disks; $35.98; Columbia). A great many complete sets of the Nine already exist: Klemperer, Karajan, Leinsdorf, Ormandy, Toscanini, Walter. But Bernstein's is the newest, and as a Beethoven interpreter he is both fiery and energetic, qualities highly necessary to this music. Calmer moments (as in the "Pastoral") now and then take on a tense, leashed-down quality that make a listener unnecessarily impatient for the storm to come. Particularly recommended to those who see Beethoven as a man with thunder in his eyes and lightning flashing from his fingertips.

Walter Gieseking: Mozart's Complete Music for Piano Solo (11 disks, 3 volumes; $32.78; Seraphim). Gieseking's Mozartian style has slid out of fashion somewhat since these recordings were made in the early 1950s; nowadays he is considered just a bit slick and overrefined. But concert pianists, more conscious of quality than fashion, still justly envy the high gloss and exquisite workmanship of Gieseking. Seraphim's low price and lucid reproduction of the mono-only sound make the release a prize for the economy-minded.

Karl Boehm: Mozart's Complete Symphonies (7 disks; Vol. II, Symphonies 25-41; $31.50; Deutsche Grammophon). Sleek and occasionally lacking in subtlety, Boehm's second half of the complete Mozart symphonies (the rest are scheduled for release in May) can be bettered on individual recordings by conductors like Szell, Davis or Walter. But apart from Boehm, the only first-rank conductor to produce a marathon Mozart is Erich Leinsdorf, whose performance of the symphonies (Westminster, 1967) is badly handicapped by a brassy, unresonant recording. By contrast DGG's sound is sumptuous. Though Boehm's conducting is eminently musical, the final effect is earthbound even where the music most demands seraphic sounds.

Alan Mandel: Forty Works for the Piano by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (4 disks; $23.25; Desto). Though not a complete collection of Gottschalk's piano works, this sizable sampling runs the gamut from the macabre to the silly, from the awesome to the danceable. Gottschalk's music is a curious and attractive blend of styles--Creole rhythms, American folk tunes, European romanticism--all transformed into brilliant display pieces for a flashy pianist. Mandel plays it all with sufficient flair--and some serious technical shortcomings. But until a better-equipped pianist decides to improve on this set, Mandel gives a sound idea of what this strange and wonderful music is all about.

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