It is a pity that the essay by Jeremy Commons and Peter Murray, included in the original LP booklet, was not reprinted here. With an array of quotations from surprised enthusiasts and with a good deal of detailed exposition on their own part, the authors almost persuade one that the opera is indeed ''a powerful, dark-hued masterpiece'', as they claim. The usual objection of course has been along the lines of Verdi's, ''Hamlet and dance tunes!!... Poor Shakespeare!'' The answer to that is simple: it hasn't anything to do with Shakespeare, who in any case is perfectly capable of looking after himself. The whole charade of wounded literary sensibility is absurd—to think that ''Shakespeare'' might be affronted because of this detail or that when you haven't got Shakespeare's words! No; the objection (if there is one) should be to the opera, which has some few passages of great beauty, some others which give a sort of foot-tapping, singalong pleasure, and some skilfully flavoured orchestration, but which is too pervasively trivial in its idiom and unsustained in inspiration at the points where intensity is to be maintained.
Bonynge conducts the excellent Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra with customary effectiveness. The recorded sound is fine, the production perhaps a little less so for there are times when we need, as listeners, to be made to feel the presence of courtiers or peasants. The smaller parts are well-taken, and this includes the Laertes of Gosta Winbergh, who has one solo (well-sung) and then disappears, to return only for moppingup operations in the final scene. Barbara Conrad's Gertrude would be admirable but that the voice has (quite distinct from the quick vibrato which I find attractive) a layer of wear, or of some other source of metallic tone, on the upper notes. James Morris as Claudius sometimes sounds as though he has brushed up his French by listening to Boris Christoff as Mephistopheles. Sutherland by this time had lost something in quality on high and had acquired the beginnings of that unsteadiness which marked her later singing; she still dazzles with the skill and assurance of her florid work, and her characterization is always sympathetic. Of Sherrill Milnes I feel that his is a very respec-table achievement: he is careful and expressive, varying his tone sensitively, and doing well with ''Comme une pale fleur''. But the Drinking song needs more panache—the end of the cadenza, for instance, should astound with its resources and then lead back excitingly into the tune. He is a rather elderly-sounding Hamlet, just as Suther-land is a mature Ophelia. Certainly nothing in the solo singing impressed me so much as the off-stage chorus humming the melody of ''Pale et blonde'' at the end of the Mad scene: the point at which in Melba's day (we are told) the opera finished.'