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In Reply to: RE: Fritz Reiner posted by ecl876 on October 03, 2016 at 11:33:53
I'm a fan, for the most part, of Reiner's Strauss, Bartok, Respighi, and Mahler. Earlier music, much less so. I don't think it's an accident that these were all leading active contemporary composers in central Europe during his youth and early professional career in Hungary and Germany in the early 20th century. Bartok was one of his teachers. Strauss was an important mentor.
Follow Ups:
Song of the Nightingale, Isle of the Dead, Rapsodie espagnole, Alborada del gracioso, Scheherazade (by general consent - I know Amphissa doesn't agree), Colas Breugnon Overture, Night on Bare Mountain, Marche slave, Rachmaninov First Concerto with Janis, Tchaikovsky First with Gilels. . .
Even that notorious Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto recording with Rubinstein (which led to their parting of the ways) is an outstanding example of the dynamism that Rubinstein was capable of when goaded on by Reiner's sadism. (Of course, Reiner even had the chutzpah to try the same kind of one-upmanship with Rachmaninoff himself, who quickly put Rat-Eyes in his place - LOL!)
And, while I'm thinking about it, how about Spanish music (Three-cornered Hat, El Amor Brujo with Price, etc.), or a couple of Beethoven symphonies (the Sixth and Ninth in particular)? I think Reiner was generally outstanding in a pretty broad swath of repertoire, even outside his axis of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germanic and Hungarian composers
Somehow, I own most of those, and of course his versions are generally successful, but none are my favorites. One reason is, there's a lot of relentless intensity in many of those that wears on me. There are other reasons, but it's getting late. ;-)
And years later I heard that guy phone in a Brahms concerto, but, hey! It was in the sticks! (Providence, RI.)
My fave Scheherazade has been Dutoit's OSM; but, if you ignore the rest of the music-making, Herbie Karajannis had the best concertmaster, Michel Schwalbé.
IMHO.
JM
I remember during my student days he very briefly took the position of concertmaster of the NY Philharmonic on an interim basis before Glenn Dicterow took over, so of course I heard him live then.
The Reiner/CSO Scheherazade is imperfect in a number of ways IMHO, among other things it isn't served as well by the minimalist early RCA stereo recording techniques as were some others from that era. The violin solos are among the problems.
How old was he when you heard him in Providence?
So he would have been about 60.
I did not find his technique lacking; there was just a sense that he would have rather been somewhere else.
JM
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Although R-K is my favorite composer, Scheherazade is far from my favorite of his works. So I might defer to others on this question. ;-)
BTW, I got to hang out with Leon Spierer, another of the Karajan-era BPO concertmasters (besides Schwalbe) for a couple of days. He was a friend of my piano teacher and I had written the program notes for his recital in San Francisco. (He must have gotten some time off from the BPO to do the recital.) It's funny, but the only work on this recital that I remember now is the Schoenberg Phantasy, Op. 47 - a tough nut to crack, even for committed Schoenbergians.
And here he is!
I don't believe I ever heard that Maazel/BPO version either - it comes from a time when DG's recorded sound with the BPO was at its worst IMHO (when the Tonmeisters seemed to be thinking "the more microphones the better!"), so I'm sure that that influenced my decision not to investigate it. Maazel certainly had his moments - as an interpretation, it might be pretty good.
That's him..
And it ain't half bad.
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