Word: reiner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mahler: Symphony No. 4 (Lisa Delia Casa; the Chicago Symphony, conducted by Fritz Reiner; RCA Victor, mono and stereo). Even in the flood of Mahler-year recordings, Conductor Reiner's brilliant, surgically clean reading of the Fourth is a standout. Under his baton, the massive Mahler sonorities remain remarkably clear and unclotted, and what often smacks of bombast in other performances emerges as music of dignity and grandeur. Soprano Delia Casa sings the folklike melody of the fourth movement with warmth and charm...
...refer fondly to his First Piano Concerto as his "stepchild." Critics have often used harsher terms. "Unmitigated ugliness," wrote the Nation at the work's U.S. premiere. That was in 1928, when the 46-year-old composer himself was at the piano and his old friend Fritz Reiner on the podium. Since then, the work has rarely been performed in Europe and never by a major U.S. orchestra. Last week it made a long overdue reappearance under the baton of Conductor Reiner, and this time the stepchild clearly strode with a giant's tread...
...piano soloist with Reiner's Chicago Symphony was Rudolf Serkin, who virtually alone among major pianists will attempt Bartok's fiendishly difficult work (at the premiere, recalls Reiner, Bartok himself made several mistakes). In preparation for the concerto, Reiner put his orchestra through five long rehearsals, three of them with Serkin...
...gained its effect from the almost somnolent alternation of the piano's sinuous theme with the whisper of a drum, the rasp of a snare, the tinkle of a triangle; the wildly fragmented third movement erupted in brief, craggy patterns stitched together only by the surgical precision of Reiner's conducting...
...both conductor and soloist, the performance was an act of devotion. Hungarian-born Fritz Reiner studied under Bartok at the Academy of Music in Budapest. Early in his career, Reiner started championing Bartok's works. "We were both from the same stable," he says, and adds in a rare burst of humility: "Of course, he was the great Bela Bartok, and I was only the little Fritz Reiner...