Some of the New York Philharmonic musicians who live in the suburbs spent yesterday morning digging themselves free from snow.
A tiny handful never did make the concert.
But, after a fifteen-minute delay, the substantially complete Philharmonic assembled on stage for the afternoon's proceedings.
They faced a rather small audience, as quite a few subscribers apparently had decided to forego the pleasures of the afternoon.

It was an excellent concert.
Paul Paray, rounding out his current stint with the orchestra, is a solid musician, and the Philharmonic plays for him.
Their collaboration in the Beethoven Second Symphony was lucid, intelligent and natural sounding.
It was not a heavy, ponderous Beethoven.
The music sang nicely, sprinted evenly when necessary, was properly accented and balanced.

The Franck symphonic poem, "Psyche", is a lush, sweet-sounding affair that was pleasant to encounter once again.
Fortunate for the music itself, it is not too frequent a visitor;
if it were, its heavily chromatic harmonies would soon become cloying.

Mr. Paray resisted the temptation to over-emphasize the melodic elements of the score.
He did not let the strings, for instance, weep, whine or get hysterical.
His interpretation was a model of refinement and accuracy.

And in the Prokofieff C major Piano Concerto, with Zadel Skolovsky as soloist, he was an admirable partner.
Mr. Skolovsky's approach to the concerto was bold, sweeping and tonally percussive.
He swept through the music with ease, in a non-sentimental and ultra-efficient manner.

An impressive technician, Mr. Skolovsky has fine rhythm, to boot.
His tone is the weakest part of his equipment;
it tends to be hard and colorless.
A school of thought has it that those attributes are exactly what this concerto needs.
It is, after all, a non-romantic work (even with the big, juicy melody of the second movement);
and the composer himself was called the "age of steel pianist".
But granted all this, one still would have liked to have heard a little more tonal nuance than Mr. Skolovsky supplied.

Taken as a whole, though, it was a strong performance from both pianist and orchestra.
Mr. Skolovsky fully deserved the warm reception he received.

A new work on the program was Nikolai Lopatnikoff's "Festival Overture", receiving its first New York hearing.
This was composed last year as a salute to the automobile industry.
It is not program music, though.
It runs a little more than ten minutes, is workmanlike, busy, methodical and featureless.

"La Gioconda", like it or not, is a singer's opera.
And so, of course, it is a fan's opera as well.
Snow or no, the fans were present in force at the Metropolitan Opera last night for a performance of the Ponchielli work.

So the plot creaks, the sets are decaying, the costumes are pre-historic, the orchestra was sloppy and not very well connected with what the singers were doing.
After all, the opera has juicy music to sing and the goodies are well distributed, with no less than six leading parts.

One of those parts is that of evil, evil Barnaba, the spy.
His wicked deeds were carried on by Anselmo Colzani, who was taking the part for the first time with the company.

He has the temperament and the stage presence for a rousing villain and he sang with character and strong tone.
What was lacking was a real sense of phrase, the kind of legato singing that would have added a dimension of smoothness to what is, after all, a very oily character.

Regina Resnik as Laura and Cesare Siepi as Alvise also were new to the cast, but only with respect to this season;
they have both sung these parts here before.
Laura is a good role for Miss Resnik, and she gave it force, dramatic color and passion.

Mr. Siepi was, as always, a consummate actor;
with a few telling strokes he characterized Alvise magnificently.
Part of this characterization was, of course, accomplished with the vocal chords.
His singing was strong and musical;
unfortunately his voice was out of focus and often spread in quality.

Eileen Farrell in the title role, Mignon Dunn as La Cieca and Richard Tucker as Enzo were holdovers from earlier performances this season, and all contributed to a vigorous performance.
If only they and Fausto Cleva in the pit had got together a bit more.

"Melodious birds sing madrigals" saith the poet and no better description of the madrigaling of the Deller Consort could be imagined.

Their Vanguard album Madrigal Masterpieces (BG 609;
stereo BGS 5031) is a good sample of the special, elegant art of English madrigal singing.
It also makes a fine introduction to the international art form with good examples of Italian and English madrigals plus several French "chansons".

The English have managed to hold onto their madrigal tradition better than anyone else.
The original impulses came to England late (in the sixteenth century) and continue strong long after everyone else had gone on to the baroque basso continuo, sonatas, operas and the like.

Even after Elizabethan traditions were weakened by the Cromwellian interregnum, the practice of singing together -- choruses, catches and glees -- always flourished.
The English never again developed a strong native music that could obliterate the traces of an earlier great age the way, say, the opera in Italy blotted out the Italian madrigal.

Early interest

Latter-day interest in Elizabethan singing dates well back into the nineteenth century in England, much ahead of similar revivals in other countries.
As a result no comparable literature of the period is better known and better studied nor more often performed than the English madrigal.

Naturally, Mr. Deller and the other singers in his troupe are most charming and elegant when they are squarely in their tradition and singing music by their countrymen: William Byrd, Thomas Morley and Thomas Tomkins.
There is an almost instrumental quality to their singing, with a tendency to lift out important lines and make them lead the musical texture.
Both techniques give the music purity and clarity.

Claude Jannequin's vocal description of a battle (the French equivalents of tarantara, rum-tum-tum, and boom-boom-boom are very picturesque) is lots of fun, and the singers get a sense of grace and shape into other chansons by Jannequin and Lassus.
Only with the more sensual, intense and baroque expressions of Marenzio, Monteverdi and Gesualdo does the singing seem a little superficial.

Nevertheless, the musicality, accuracy and infectious charm of these performances, excellently reproduced, make it an attractive look-see at the period.
The works are presented chronologically.
Texts and translations are provided.

Elegance and color

The elements of elegance and color in Jannequin are strong French characteristics.
Baroque instrumental music in Italy and Germany tends to be strong, lively, intense, controlled and quite abstract.
In France, it remained always more picturesque, more dancelike, more full of flavor.

Couperin and Rameau gave titles to nearly everything they wrote, not in the later sense of "program music" but as a kind of nonmusical reference for the close, clear musical forms filled with keen wit and precise utterance.

Both composers turn up on new imports from France.
BAM is the unlikely name of a French recording company whose full label is Editions De La boite A Musique.
They specialize in out-of-the-way items and old French music naturally occupies a good deal of their attention.
Sonates et Concerts Royaux of Couperin Le Grand occupy two disks (LD056 and LD060) and reveal the impeccable taste and workmanship of this master -- delicate, flexible and gemlike.

The Concerts -- nos. 2, 6, 9, 10 and 14 are represented -- are really closer to chamber suites than to concertos in the Italian sense.
The sonatas, "La Francaise", "La Sultane", "L'Astree" and "L'Imperiale", are often more elaborately worked out and, in fact, show a strong Italian influence.

Couperin also turns up along with some lesser-known contemporaries on a disk called Musique Francaise Du 18e Siecle (BAM LD 060).
Jean-Marie LeClair still is remembered a bit, but Bodin De Beismortier, Corrette and Mondonville are hardly household words.
What is interesting about these chamber works here is how they all reveal the aspect of French music that was moving toward the rococo.

The Couperin "La Steinkerque", with its battle music, brevity, wit and refined simplicity, already shakes off Corelli and points towards the mid-century elegances that ended the baroque era.
If Couperin shows the fashionable trend, the others do so all the more.

All these records have close, attractive sound and the performances by a variety of instrumentalists is characteristic.

Rameau's Six Concerts En Sextuor, recorded by L'orchestre De Chambre Pierre Menet (BAM LD 046), turn out to be harpsichord pieces arranged for strings apparently by the composer himself.
The strange, delightful little character pieces with their odd and sometimes inexplicable titles are still evocative and gracious.

Maitres Allemands Des 17e et 18e Siecles contains music by Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Rosenmueller and Telemann, well performed by the Ensemble Instrumental Sylvie Spycket (BAM LD 035).

Rococo music -- a lot of it -- was played in Carnegie Recital Hall on Saturday night in the first of four concerts being sponsored this season by a new organization known as Globe Concert Arts.

Works by J. C. Bach, Anton Craft, Joseph Haydn, Giuseppe Sammartini, Comenico Dragonetti and J. G. Janitsch were performed by seven instrumentalists including Anabel Brieff, flutist, Josef Marx, oboist, and Robert Conant, pianist and harpsichordist.

Since rococo music tends to be pretty and elegant above all, it can seem rather vacuous to twentieth-century ears that have grown accustomed to the stress and dissonances of composers from Beethoven to Boulez.

Thus there was really an excess of eighteenth-century charm as one of these light-weight pieces followed another on Saturday night.
Each might find a useful place in a varied musical program, but taken together they grew quite tiresome.

The performances were variable, those of the full ensemble being generally satisfying, some by soloists proving rather trying.

Ellie Mao, soprano, and Frederick Fuller, baritone, presented a program of folksongs entitled "East Meets West" in Carnegie Recital Hall last night.
They were accompanied by Anna Mi Lee, pianist.

Selections from fifteen countries were sung as solos and duets in a broad range of languages.
Songs from China and Japan were reserved exclusively for Miss Mao, who is a native of China, and those of the British Isles were sung by Mr. Fuller, who is English by birth.

This was not a program intended to illustrate authentic folk styles.
On the contrary, Miss Mao and Mr. Fuller chose many of their arrangements from the works of composers such as Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Canteloube, Copland and Britten.
There was, therefore, more musical substance in the concert than might have been the case otherwise.
The performances were assured, communicative and pleasingly informal.

What was omitted from "A Neglected Education" were those essentials known as "the facts of life".

Chabrier's little one-act operetta, presented yesterday afternoon at Town Hall, is a fragile, precious little piece, very French, not without wit and charm.
The poor uneducated newlywed, a certain Gontran De Boismassif, has his problems in getting the necessary information.
The humor of the situation can be imagined.

It all takes place in the eighteenth century.
What a silly, artificial way of life, Chabrier and his librettists chuckle.
But they wish they could bring it back.

Chabrier's delightful music stands just at the point where the classical, rationalist tradition, (handed down to Chabrier largely in the form of operetta and salon music) becomes virtually neo-classicism.
The musical cleverness and spirit plus a strong sense of taste and measure save a wry little joke from becoming either bawdy or mawkish.

The simple, clever production was also able to tread the thin line between those extremes.
Arlene Saunders was charming as poor Gontran.
Yes, Arlene is her name;
the work uses the old eighteenth-century tradition of giving the part of a young inexperienced youth to a soprano.
Benita Valente was delightful as the young wife and John Parella was amusing as the tutor who failed to do all his tutoring.

The work was presented as the final event in the Town Hall Festival of Music.
It was paired with a Darius Milhaud opera, "The Poor Sailor", set to a libretto by Jean Cocteau, a kind of Grand Guignol by the sea, a sailor returns, unrecognized, and gets done in by his wife.

With the exception of a few spots, Milhaud's music mostly churns away with his usual collection of ditties, odd harmonies, and lumbering, satiric orchestration.