Word: reiner
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...Metropolitan Opera, with the notable help of its new conductor Fritz Reiner, had made a good many of its critics eat their words with a great performance of Salome (TIME, Feb. 14). Last week, the Met and its Maestro Reiner served them another mouthful-and let a nationwide radio audience...
This time, pudgy Conductor Reiner had no sensational Salome to work with. For his second opera, the Met hauled out of storage a number that takes elbow grease and even more finesse: Verdi's last, perhaps greatest but hardly popular opera, the ephemeral, fast-moving Falstaff...
...Reiner didn't get quite the cast he had in mind, but the cast he faced across the footlights was one that no conductor could kick about: big-voiced Leonard Warren as the fat Sir John himself, brilliant young Giuseppe Valdengo, who made his first big U.S. splash as Lago in Toscanini's 1947 broadcast of Otello, Soprano Licia Albanese and Mezzo Cloe Elmo...
When singing rehearsals started, one singer insisted he knew his role perfectly and demanded to be excused. He got a flat "no"-and a piece of conductorial lip besides. Snapped Reiner: "I learn things in rehearsal, and it is possible that a singer may. I believe you should take the risk...
Evil in Purple. What a sell-out audience saw when the curtain finally went up on Salome last week, they would not soon forget. From the pit (which Reiner had ordered lowered to its bottom notch so he and the huge, augmented orchestra could try to keep out of sight), they heard the power, brilliance and detail of Strauss's music as they had seldom heard it before. Onstage, they saw an incandescently evil Salome, flashing in green, purple and red, who commanded the performance from beginning to end. Soprano Welitsch had critics reaching back for comparisons to Olive...