On noting the contents of this record, flute buffs--who these days would seem to outnumber football fans! --are likely to be disappointed, for Signor Gazzelloni (GOD­zel-LO-nee) has not chosen to conquer any new worlds thereon. If the D major Prokofiev sonata was once something of a novelty in its flute version (it is also known as the second violin sonata), the November Schwann catalog lists six versions and one of them (Rampal's) is duplicated in the MHS catalogue (which Schwann, for high moral reasons, stubbornly chooses to ignore). And it seems to me that I'm always stumbling over "Syrinx"--it once turned up in a Fischer-Dieskau song recital! -- for which the performer doesn't have to pay an accompanist. ("Syrinx" began life as music to a play Psyche by Gabriel Mourey, with whom Debussy once thought of writing a Tristan. "Syrinx" can mean (l) the Eustachian tube (2)a fistula (3)a kind of secondary Larynx found in birds; here, however, it refers to the panpipes, which the god Pan made out of reeds, into one of which a similarly-named nymph had turned herself to avoid being raped by him.) Since the Bach flute. sonatas were among the first works to attract the "the complete" LP band­wagon, the G minor has received a lot of exposure. Whether it is Papa Bach's and whether it was originally for flute appear still to be subjects of scholarly controversy. One writer tells me that no manuscript of it in Bach's hand has ever been found, and that the piece is probably by Emanuel. Another says that Spitta himself knew the original manuscript, that Bach wrote the sonata when he was about eighteen, and that it is emphatically not for violin (as its numbering in the Collected Works indicates it to be). A third calls it a violin sonata and not authentic. All three utterances appeared within the decade; so much for authority.

The Boccherini concerto, beside these pieces, qualifies as an almost-neglected work. There was once a mono recording on Vox by Camillo Wanausek which went down the drain with most other monos. MHS has offered a stereo version by Peter-Lukas Graf for the past few years. And there is a recent Philips also by Gazzelloni (with different coupling and with accompaniment by I Musici). Long ago someone tacked that silly sobriquet "the Wife of Haydn" onto Boccherini and turned a lot of people off of an utterly charming composer. In the 1950s there was a Boccherini mini-boom on records. A number of the symphonies were to be had from various sources (now there is only a set of six on Telefunken). Westminster brought out some beguiling chamber pieces, and Angel bravely embarked on a complete version of all 150-odd quintets. All these offerings have disappeared and most people now know Boccherini by a "cello concerto," put together with adhesive tape by one Grutzmacher. Too bad.

The big news here is Severino Gazzelloni, who, to be trite about it, has become a legend in his own time. Though he plays a lot of "normal" music as first flute of the Rome Symphony and Rome Radio Orchestras, he is, like trombonist Vinko Globocar and singer Cathy Berberian, a specialist in the new techniques demanded by avant-garde music, and there is nothing that a flute can be asked to play that he can't do. Those few Gazzelloni records that have appeared here are mostly of the ultra-modern ilk, if you've a hankering to hear him double-stopping and playing percussion on the keys. Pianist Bruno Canino has established himself as another avant-garde favorite and has recently recorded The Berio two-piano concerto. An amiable and lanky young man with a flop of black hair and a droopy mustache, he played docile accompanist to Berberian' s imperious recitalist in her satiric Edinburgh Recital--and may be seen so performing on the jacket of RCA's recorded memento of that event.