Fritz Reiner Before Chicago

cover of the collection being discussed

The Hungarian conductor Fritz Reiner is probably best known for his tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the Fifties and early Sixties. (Reiner died on November 15, 1963.) However, prior to his move to the United States in 1922, he had established some significant contacts. The earliest of these took place during his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where his piano teacher was Béla Bartók. Then, as an opera conductor in both Budapest and Dresden, he had opportunities to work closely with Richard Strauss.

He came to the United States to assume the post of Principal Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (A sidebar is in order here: I have a neighbor whose father played viola in this orchestra under Reiner. She relayed a story of how Bartók had come to Cincinnati to perform one of his piano concertos under Reiner’s baton, a delightful turn of events since the conductor’s student days!) In 1931 he left Cincinnati to teach at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his pupils included both Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss. His next major conducting tenure took place with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra between 1938 and 1948, after which he spent several years conducting at the Metropolitan Opera before making his move to Chicago.

Reiner’s earliest recordings were made on November 22, 1938. He conducted the New York Philharmonic in two albums of three 78 discs. RCA Victor engineers made the recordings, but the albums were kept anonymous, since they were used for promotional purposes by the New York Post. As a result, Reiner’s name never appeared on a recording until 1940, when Columbia Records produced his first albums with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

This past September Sony Classical released a collection of all the recordings Reiner made for Columbia on fourteen CDs. Almost all of the tracks involve Reiner conducting the Pittsburgh. However, there is one CD with the Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra. The album itself had been produced to showcase soprano Ljuba Welitsch, meaning that seven of the ten tracks were song selections in which she was accompanied only by pianist Paul Ulanowsky. However, her Met experiences with Reiner were represented by excerpts from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Strauss. Most importantly, Welitsch pretty much “owned” the role of Salome in Strauss’ Opus 54 opera; and the CD concludes with the final scene from that opera, whose dynamite qualities rise above any shortcomings in the recording technology.

There are also several tracks attributed to the “Columbia String Ensemble” and one to the “Columbia Symphony Orchestra.” These were probably “pickup” groups, recorded at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in Manhattan with musicians performing with both the Philharmonic and the Met. The “Ensemble” performances cover all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos and will probably make listeners with “historical preferences” cringe. On the other hand the “Symphony Orchestra” is accompanying Oscar Levant in a performance of Arthur Honegger’s concertino, a recording I had previously discussed in September of 2018 after the release of the eight-disc anthology A Rhapsody in Blue; the extraordinary life of Oscar Levant. I was delighted with the opportunity to listen to Honegger’s music then, and I was just as delighted to revisit it in this Reiner anthology.

The Pittsburgh recordings go for considerable breadth. My guess is that, between the orchestra’s management and Columbia’s commercial interests, Reiner had to make a generous number of compromises. Nevertheless, he did manage to include Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” in the catalog, even if the only other Bartók selection consisted of two brief movements from the Hungarian Pictures suite. (The latter would later be recorded in its entirety by RCA in Chicago.) Strauss, on the other hand, gets more generous attention, which includes the Opus 60 orchestral suite compiled from incidental music for the Molière play Le bourgeois gentilhomme. The music of Johannes Brahms, on the other hand, gets far less attention but stands out with a dynamite account of the Opus 15 (first) piano concerto in D minor with soloist Rudolf Serkin. Curiously, Ludwig van Beethoven is represented only by his Opus 36 (second) symphony in D major. The earliest recordings are on the CD devoted entirely to Richard Wagner, and they left me hungering for an opportunity to listen to Reiner conduct one of that composer’s operas in its entirety.

If all this amounts to a somewhat uneven anthology, the high points are incontestably “worth the price of admission!”