From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor takes in a new collection charting the early recordings of the conductor Fritz Reiner
The Hungarian emigré conductor Fritz Reiner – admired for his musicianship, feared for his exacting temperament – had a formidable reputation for training orchestras. As chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s and early ’60s, he made a celebrated series of Chicago recordings for RCA’S Living Stereo label, remastered as extraordinary sonic documents. But Reiner’s career on record began much earlier during his decade with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra from 1938, and that’s the musical story that unfolds in this set of his Complete Columbia Album Collection (Sony 19075936772; 14 CDS), at the tail end of the 78 era. The mono recordings lack the astonishing clarity of the Living Stereo tapes, but the remastering is effective, and there are things here Reiner never returned to in the studio.
We can hear how Reiner took the flagging, financially challenged Pittsburgh orchestra and drilled it into a broadcast and recording ensemble of real potency, with a reputation as the most rigorous training ground for orchestral musicians. The Bach is hopelessly un-stylish to modern ears, but Reiner’s Mozart is a different story, with Classically proportioned and crisply articulated accounts of Symphonies 35 and 40. Beethoven’s Second Symphony is taut and exciting, and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Rudolf Serkin has appropriate symphonic grandeur. A student of Bartók’s in Budapest, Reiner did his best to support his former teacher, his 1946 recording of the Concerto for Orchestra – a passionately felt account with the original ending – being its first. Reiner was also a friend of Richard Strauss, and his Ein Heldenleben and especially Don Quixote with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky are potent recordings, as is the final scene from Salome with soprano Ljuba Welitsch and the Met Orchestra. Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony receives a powerfully propelled 1945 account, while Reiner commissioned Robert Russell Bennett’s Symphonic Picture from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and his affection for the score shines through.