GHCD 2333 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review

FRITZ REINER NBC SYMPHONY NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC CHICAGO SYMPHONY LIVE RECORDINGS 1943 - 1957 SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 6 DEBUSSY Fêtes(Nocturnes) TCHAIKOVSKY Marche Minaiture   PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) Peter and the Wolf – A musical tale for children, Op.67 - LAURITZ MELCHIOR narrator SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)  - Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op.54 - III. Presto J. S. BACH (1685-1750) (arr: Lucien Cailliet) - Fugue in G minor

Contents:

In recalling the Hungarian-born, naturalised American, conductor Frederick Martin (Fritz) Reiner (1888-1963), more than twenty years after his death, the composer, conductor and pianist Morton Gould said, ‘Reiner never had the dazzling public image of his peers, but they had admiration and envy of his mastery and musical prowess.’ 

How right Gould was. Indeed, although Reiner held three important American conducting posts – at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Chicago, spanning a period of forty years from 1922-62 – his world-wide reputation was made, as was that of two other Hungarian-born conductors of approximately the same generation - George Szell and Eugene Ormandy - more through gramophone recordings than through international tours. In the United States, regular broadcasts of symphony concerts were another main conduit through which conductors reputations were enhanced. 

Reiner made no recordings with the Cincinnati Orchestra – although his immediate predecessor, the great Belgian violinist, conductor (and composer) Eugene Ysaye, had done so. In Cincinnati Reiner had demonstrated the breadth of his sympathies and his interest in new music by, for example, giving the second performance of Gershwin’s An American in Paris after Walter Damrosch had conducted the premiere in New York. Also in Cincinnati, Reiner introduced much modern music - by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Milhaud, Bartok and other leaders of the then avant-garde - alongside a wide spectrum of compositions from the standard orchestral repertoire.

After nine years in Cincinnati, Reiner was obliged to resign from the Orchestra in 1931, following an unpleasant divorce from his second wife, and seven years were to elapse before his next major conducting appointment, although meanwhile he had been named professor of conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia – where his pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss – and in the mid-1930s he also appeared occasionally in Europe, including engagements at London’s Covent Garden Opera House.

In 1938 Reiner was appointed music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra – a contract which lasted for eleven years. It was during this period that he came into his own as a conductor of world stature, raising the standard of the orchestra to rival the finest in the United States. As a consequence, Reiner’s reputation rose greatly, alongside that of his orchestra, and when in 1943 the New York Philharmonic sought guest conductors prior to Artur Rodzinski being named as the Orchestra’s music director, Fritz Reiner was high on their list. In 1947, with Toscanini in post-war Europe for some time, Reiner conducted broadcast concerts with the maestro’s NBC Symphony. But it was Reiner’s final major appointment in1952 as chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony, that was to cement his stature world-wide, largely owing to a spectacular series of recordings for RCA.

Throughout those forty years in the United States, Reiner’s reputation as a conductor was often set against his reputation in human relationships, both private and public. By all accounts, he could be a difficult man to deal with, the highest musical standards he had set himself spilling over into his personal dealings. But few great musicians emerge unsullied from such considerations, for reasons which are not hard to seek. A great artist is at heart a highly sensitive soul, whose emotional antennae are perhaps nearer the surface than those of others; to protect their sensitivities and their greater propensity to suffer hurt, a harder – often more temperamental – shell is often  adopted: such, surely, was the case with Fritz Reiner, whose autocratic approach struck fear into musicians. During Reiner’s years at the Curtis Institute, one of his first pupils, Boris Goldovsky, recalled: ‘From the moment Reiner mounted the podium and faced the student orchestra, there was a silence in that hall such as I had never heard before. The man’s look was terrifying. He had a gimlet eye that could pierce you like a dagger, even when he was looking at you from the side, and he had a tongue to match.’

Such may have been his methods to get attention, to hold it and to train his orchestra, but his ‘mastery and musical prowess’ as Morton Gould said, were equally legendary – if not more so. As early as 1925, conducting Stravinsky in his then-new Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, such qualities were experienced by Stravinsky himself: ‘Most conductors devote several rehearsals to the preparation of my Concerto, but on this occasion we had barely half an hour. And there was a miracle. There was not a single hitch. It was as though Reiner had played it time and again with that orchestra. Such an extraordinary phenomenon could never have occurred, notwithstanding the prodigious technique of the conductor and the high quality of the orchestra, if Reiner had not acquired a perfect knowledge of my score, which he had procured some time before.’  In the face of such profound musicianship, Reiner’s occasional lack of tact may be forgiven.

The collection of performances which go to make up this album reveals much of Reiner’s genius as a conductor, rather more so of course in the then contemporary Soviet repertoire, but equally in the shorter, more familiar, items. As mentioned earlier, in 1947 Arturo Toscanini was in Europe for the summer months, and during his absence from New York, the NBC Symphony – which had been formed especially for him in 1937 to cement his return to the city – continued to give broadcast concerts with guest conductors. Reiner was one of them, and he continued to conduct the NBC Symphony in the summer months annually until 1950. From one of Reiner’s 1947 programmes we open with Mozart’s overture to his opera the Impresario, K 486 (first given at Schonbrunn in 1786). This demonstrates Reiner’s little-appreciated magnificence in Mozart – despite his fast tempi, which Mozart’s music can stand if the artistic sensitivity is there as well. It is certainly here, with skill and artistry, for Reiner succeeds in phrasing with exquisite sensibility and spontaneity. From one of those NBC summer programmes of two years later, June 19^th 1949 to be exact, we hear Prokofiev’s musical tale for children, Peter and the Wolf, which had been given for the first time in Moscow in May 1936, and which – following the first recording of it in the West, by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitsky – had become world-famous within a few years. The narrator in Reiner’s performance with the NBC Symphony is the great Danish-born (1890) but then recently naturalised American heldentenor Lauritz Melchoir, whose rich speaking voice is an added attraction to his admirable avuncular style of delivery of the text. There are many felicitous touches in both Melchior’s narration and in the playing of the NBC Symphony: Reiner’s tempi are carefully calculated to fit the narration admirably.

Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony was composed between April and October 1939, the first performance being given in Leningrad under Evgeny Mravinsky on November 5^th. The American premiere came one year later, by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. They made the first recording of it in December 1940, but it was the recording by Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for American Columbia that received the more extensive international release on 78rpm discs, and was the version through which many came to know this extraordinary masterpiece. Reiner’s Columbia recording was made in March, 1945, but around eighteen months previously he had included the work in a broadcast concert by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, and that is the version included on this record, a performance which took place on August 15^th 1943 at Carnegie Hall. From its earliest performances the work made a deep impression: ‘the entire conception of the work is essentially melodic and contrapuntal, with a very open texture and cool, lucid scoring……for anyone interested in the symphony today, this No 6 of Shostakovich is indispensable’ – as the English critic Hubert Foss commented in 1947, aspects which are superbly realised in Reiner’s interpretation. 

The three remaining items in this collection come from Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts in 1957 – the Marche Miniature from Tchaikovsky’s First Orchestral Suite Opus 43; Fetes, the second of Debussy’s three Nocturnes, and Lucien Caillet’s orchestration of JS Bach’s ‘Little’ Fugue in G minor BWV 578. In comparison with Reiner’s extraordinary architectural grasp in large-scale structures (as we hear in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony), these shorter pieces reveal the conductor’s equal mastery of the smaller forms and the differences in musical characterisation that such dissimilar music demands.                                                                                 Robert Matthew-Walker

Page revised April 21st  2008