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"Rat Eyes" Reiner - certainly a fascinating figure

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on October 3, 2016 at 13:05:54

In Reply to: Fritz Reiner posted by ecl876 on October 3, 2016 at 11:33:53:

I've read both the Philip Hart and Kenneth Morgan biographies, and the article you linked to provides a good overview of what it must have been like to play under this guy. From what I can tell of the three best-known "tyrant" conductors (Reiner, Szell and Toscanini), it seems that Reiner must have been the most terrifying of the three. A few years ago, I was accompanying a trombone player whose teacher was in the CSO during the middle and late 50's - the prime Reiner years. I tried to get the teacher to tell me some anecdotes about Reiner, and it was obvious that he still had the same hate for Reiner more than 50 years later, that he had had earlier as a CSO member under Reiner. Not only would he not tell me any anecdotes, but he also muttered some choice epithets about Reiner too - obviously, his own emotional scars lasted for more than half a century!

Ah - but the recordings! Of the three tyrants I mentioned, Reiner was by far the luckiest in the sound quality provided for him on his recordings, whereby even today we can hear what a magnificent, flexible orchestra the Chicago Symphony was at that time. Reiner may have been a sadistic over-controller, but, unlike Szell's for the most part, Reiner's performances on recording almost never give me the impression of music on too tight a leash, as some of the Szell recordings do. The Reiner/CSO recordings have such an attraction to me that I've continued to re-buy them as various formats have come along: LP, CD, a first series of SACD's (the Soundmirror series), a SECOND series of SACD's (the Analogue Productions series). . . Fortunately, I never suffered from Reiner's sadism, and I guess you could say I have a continuing fascination with his recordings - although I will point out that, for all the vaunted precision of Reiner's performances, some of the ensemble is imperfect even on these great Living Stereo recordings!

After Reiner, I think Solti certainly got a lot more publicity, but Decca's use of their Storm consoles was a big stumbling block for me in appreciating the Solti/CSO sound, as it became more and more obvious that more and more microphones were crowding into the environment with each new Solti/CSO release. If you want to have a revelation, listen to Ashkenazy's recording (with Solti and the CSO) of the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto and compare it with Cliburn's recording (with Reiner and the CSO): if you don't come away from that comparison with the idea that something in the sound quality deteriorated (quite obviously!) in those years since Decca replaced RCA as the CSO's recording company, then I would begin to fear that we don't even have a commonality of understanding as to what constitutes decent sound quality! ;-)

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