A late recording: Beethoven's Quartet Opus 18 No. 5, recorded by the Coolidge Quartet. The quartet, one of those early six in which Beethoven found his style, is played with plenty of spirit by the Coolidge Quartet, but is a little raw, lacking the perfect integration of a quartet like the Budapest.

About Twelfth Night: Margaret Webster, Maurice Evans, and company, who produced it in New York, missed up on a wonderful opportunity to present Elizabethan music in its original setting. Some of the loveliest madrigals of the age were written to the lyrics in Twelfth Night, Come Away, Sweet Death particularly, and the entire play simply cries out for an Elizabethan vocal and instrumental score. Paul Bowles' music is excellent, but no substitute for the real thing.

About Fantasia: Probably no single occasion has demonstrated more compellingly the visual possibilities in great music. When you or I listen to the Nutcracker Suite, we have a vague picture of toy flutes, Chinamen, Arabians, sugarplum fairies--anything the program tells us to hear. When Walt Disney hears it, there are created whole new imaginative worlds of dewdrops, mushrooms, tadpoles, thistles, and autumn leaves. The more visual-minded you are, probably the more you will enjoy Fantasia; plenty of people on the other hand are going to find the patterns on the screen nothing but a distraction. Particularly in the Bach Toccata and Fugue. To many, the swirls, squirls, blobs, and blotches of color on the screen were boring and meaningless. To me they were an exciting visualitation of exactly what happens in the mind when a Bach fugue is played. I agree with those who disliked Disney's Pastoral Symphony because it was artificial and not a little silly, and with those who thought most of The Rite of Spring pretty flimsy stuff. But this may be only because we are too rigidly addicted to a standard program for some works.

I think Leopold Stokowski is kidding himself if he believes that Fantasia and others like it will be a means of bringing music to the masses. Music can be brought to the people only qua music. Diluting it, making it palatable with a sideshow, only takes attention away from it, and defeats its purpose. Certainly it cannot deepen the appreciation of music. Another point: If people get used to the glittery, theatrical quality of "Fantasound," the way it is projected from various wings in order to heighten effect, their ears are liable to be spoiled for natural musical sounds. But this is pure conjecture. At the present, the worst thing about Fantasia is not that people are seeing too much of it, but that so few people are able to see it.