Victor's feature release for March is the Toscanini-Horowitz recording of the Brahms B-flat Piano Concerto (Album M-740). Without going into a detailed criticism of the concerto--I for one consider it inferior to the best Mozart and Beethoven concertos--there is no doubt but that it is conceived on as lavish and massive a scale as any work of its kind ever has been since. The profusion of themes, the copiousness of orchestration, the "tiny" sherzo thrown in, the extreme energy bursting forth at every point, all make of it something quite unique in concerto literature. Of course, it can be played any number of different ways. It can sound broad and serene as played by a Schnabel, or it may sound wild and furious as it does played by Horowitz. But which style is better must remain largely a matter of individual taste. The old Schnabel recording is a miracle in its way--quiet, restrained, noble--yet there is no denying that the music has bombast in it, and Horowitz, who has hardly been noted as an apostle of restraint, is merely running true to form when he exploits the bombast. Whether this performance will not begin to irritate after the fifth or sixth playing is hard to predict, but I incline to think it will. Technically, the recording is excellent except for an occasional scratchy surface and that unpleasant wavery effect toward the end of the second movement.

Less pretentious but in its own way just as enjoyable is the Beethoven String Guartet Opus 18 No. 6, one of the most spontaneous and delightfully humorous of the early quartets, to which the recording by the Coolidge Quartet (Album M-745) does full justice. . . . Also of a genial and unpretentious nature is the Corelli Concerto Grosso No. 11 in B-Flat, in dance suite form, recorded on a single Victor record (No. 12587) by Arthur Fiedler and his Sinfonietta. The finding of this concerto by the scholarly efforts of Mr. Fiedler is typical of the great practical service of musicologists like him who every year rescue so much lost music from the forgotten bowels of museums. Musicological research unearthed the William Boyce Symphonies, the Miniature Suite by John Christopher Smith, and hosts of other little-known works by earlier masters. The steady rediscovery of old music gives a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that the corpus of preceding music is not dead and petrified into a canon, but progresses as steadily as that of contemporary composing. . . .

The Germanic Museum has announced a program of music for organ and strings to be given tonight in the main hall by E. Power Biggs and members of the Stradivarius Quartet.. Opening the program is a group of English organ solos by William Byrd. John Bull, Purcell. William Walond, organist at Oxford in the eighteenth century, and John Stanley, the famous blind organist at the Temple during the same century. Byrd's Pavan for the Earl of Salisbury was commonly played on the virginals, and Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary and Trumpet Airs on the harpsichord. But since at that time the general term "clavier" applied indiscriminately to all keyboard instruments, a clavier piece might be played either on the virginals, harpsichord, clavichord, or organ, Organs of that day, having no pedal board, did not require music written specially in three staves, and so could play regular two-staff clavier music. And to adopt a clavier composition for the modern organ, all that is needed is to transpose the bass for pedal board. . . . Tonight's program also includes the famous Vivaldi D-Minor Concerto arranged for organ by J. S. Bach, but long attributed, through some bungled manuscripts, to his son, William Friedemann Bach.

An extremely interesting section of the program is to be devoted to chamber-music by Corelli and Mozart for two violins, cello, and organ continuo. Sonatas written for this combination, with the harpsichord as an alternate for the continuo, were the equivalent in Corelli's day of the string quartet, and in fact evolved into the later form during the classical period. Corelli himself wrote a tremendous volume of them, some forty odd, of which two are to be played tonight. Three of Mozart's one-movement sonatas for the same combination of instruments will also be played, and they probably represent a revived interest on Mozart's part in the by then slightly archaic chamber form.