Music: Angel at Two

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In its programing, Angel sometimes rushes in where even the foolhardy fear to tread, e.g., it has released such a risque modern work as Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Teresias. But there is also a large quota of safe and popular items—currently a new Madama Butterfly (the seventh on LP) ^and Oistrakh playing Lalo's Symphonic Espagnole. On the chic side, there are exquisite performances of the most sensuous musings of Debussy (Trois Nocturnes, La Mer) and Ravel (Daphnis et Chloe, L'Heure Espagnole}. There are also imposing works of Stravinsky and Bartok.

Even the middlebrow part of the catalogue is pretty dressy when a soprano of the stature of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf stars in Johann Strauss' Fledermaus.

Lapping It Up. Dorle's years in the concert business have sharpened the Sorias' musical taste, and Dario's residence in radio row has sharpened their box-office sense. Most records originate with EMI, but "I get ideas," says Dorle.

She read Gerald Moore's book The Unashamed Accompanist, about his ups and downs at the keyboard, and thought it would make the basis of a good record. It did. "We have some friends who love cats," she adds. "I like cats all right, and a cat record occurred to me." Practical Cats, with Robert Donat reading T. S. Eliot poems to music by Alan Rawsthorne, turned up in due course.

The reading is humorless and the music is indifferent, but cat lovers are lapping it all up.

Says Dorle: "I treat my records like artists. They are alive, like artists going into your home. I can't treat records like pancakes."