Things are getting grisly at Tower Records, all of whose stores will evidently be shuttered by next week. The classical room at the Lincoln Center location, where so many of us have wiled away so many hours, has become a storehouse for random stacks of nondescript records in all genres, the classical material sequestered in one corner. The opera room, where I once glimpsed James Levine hovering near the Schreker (false hope!), is full of boxes. The remaining CDs are surprisingly interesting and contemporary-oriented: apparently they've found back stock of high-quality labels like New World, Albany, cpo, and Innova. There were some fifty copies of cpo's disc of the Second Symphony of Louise Farrenc. For fifteen dollars, I picked up Arnold Dreyblatt's 1981 Federal Hall show with the Orchestra of Excited Strings (Table of the Elements), Donald Martino's Paradiso Choruses (New World), and Andrei Eshpai's A Circle — Apocalypse (Albany). The last is a wonderfully crazy late-period Soviet piece of all-over polystylistic tendencies, its resources including a lush, unreal quotation from La Valse, an apparent citation of "The Windmills of Your Mind," some up-tempo fusion jazz worthy of a blaxploitation movie, and rhythmically driving dissonant sequences representing "chaos and destruction." And that's just the first fourteen minutes.
