Word: reiners
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Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra (the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Eduard van Beinum conducting; English Decca, 10 sides). Fritz Reiner's performance of this great work for Columbia (TIME, Jan. 3) may hold the edge in fire and power; but the fine work of the Concertgebouw, and the spaciousness and detail of Decca's recording, make this...
...productions too often leave one with memories of fashion on the promenade and little else. But Thursday night's performance of Richard Strauss' "Salome" was a very different story, and a very wonderful one. Singers and orchestra combined under Fritz Reiner's direction to give a really superb reading of Strauss' score and incidentally proved that "Salome" is an unusually fine opera which deserves far better treatment than the austere neglect it received until the Met's revival last month...
...extremely chromatic harmony, which in Strauss' tone poems often becomes banal and boring, hardly ever ceased to be interesting during Thursday's "Salome." Credit for this, belongs largely to Conductor Reiner. His interpretation was characterized by careful restraint, with the result that the final climaxes were completely overpowering...
...excellent, if at times somewhat forced, staging, which combined to make the Met's production of "Salome" such a memorable event. But the overall boss, the man who took the individual stars and orchestra and co-ordinated them, the man directly responsible for putting over "Salome" was Fritz Reiner. His work during the performance was prodigious. Here was a conductor really running the show, in the pit and on the stage...
What he did with them, and the way they sang and acted for him when the curtain was up would be remembered a while at the Met. The orchestra was elegantly incisive, and the singers were spiritedly convincing. The critics' consensus: Reiner had done it again...