REINER Rarities Volume 2 (1950-54) - PASC294

I heard Fritz Reiner conduct a performance of A Musical Joke in Chicago years ago. Apparently afraid that the audience wouldn’t “get it,” he encouraged the orchestra to clown its way through the piece. It may have been a relief for them to make the sort of mistakes that would have gotten them ruthlessly fired on any other day. If nothing else, it was the worst playing I ever heard from a professional orchestra but, for what it was, the audience did seem to appreciate it. Happily, this recording, one of several Reiner made in connection with the bicentennial of Mozart’s birth, is done absolutely straight, as if the conductor believed he were conducting a masterpiece, which, in a way, is what A Musical Joke is. I find the piece much more effective if the orchestra and conductor take it seriously. After all, the mediocre contemporaries Mozart was poking fun at were quite serious and probably had a reasonably high opinion of the stuff they were churning out.

The Reiner/NBC Symphony pairing, so effective in the Musical Joke, also proves to be a potent combination in Henri Büsser’s orchestration of Debussy’s Petite Suite. “En Bateau” is deliciously languorous while Reiner takes more conventional tempos in the following movements and takes full advantage of the orchestra’s brilliant woodwinds. The recording, a bit on the dry side, yields the kind of detail that one expects to hear when this conductor is involved. I have no idea what Reiner’s feeling was during the sessions but he conducts as if he were in a sunny mood; the results certainly would have justified it.

The oddity of the CD is Rolf Liebermann’s Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, an early Reiner/Chicago stereo recording that was, if memory serves, originally coupled with Strauss’s Don Juan. As Pristine’s annotator/producer Mark Obert-Thorn notes, the piece is a set of dance variations on a tone row. Liebermann himself described it this way: “Three classical jazz forms were used: the ‘jump,’ the ‘blues,’ and the ‘boogie-woogie.’ Since these dances are all in 4/4 time, the interludes of the symphony orchestra were largely built on irregular meters (3, 5, 7, 9). In the end the two orchestras come together in the South American dance rhythm of the mambo.” Reiner’s first Don Juan was released on CD many years ago. RCA did release a stereo LP of the Liebermann back in 1981, but both of its CD appearances have been unofficial, first from Haydn House and now from Pristine. Just to mention it, during Reiner’s first Chicago season, he had the violins divided left and right with cellos on his left and violas on his right. You can hear this on the first Don Juan recording. At some point, he decided to put both groups of violins on his left with the violas and cellos to his right, and there they stayed for the rest of his tenure. I am guessing that he believed the violinists would hear each other better on the stage of Orchestra Hall if they were seated together. I wonder if RCA held back on releasing a stereo LP of the Don Juan because it wouldn’t sound like “real” stereo. In fact, RCA had him record the piece again with the second configuration. I wonder if that’s why Also sprach Zarathustra was also (unnecessarily) rerecorded. I suspect that the original mono LP of the Liebermann didn’t exactly jump out of stores’ browsing bins and RCA saw no point in reissuing it (a two-track stereo tape, which Obert-Thorn used for this CD release, was issued in 1955). It’s an interesting enough novelty and the recording, per se, is brilliant but, for me, the Concerto wore out its welcome after the novelty wore off. Putting on such a piece now would involve hiring a lot of proficient extra musicians and, I expect, considerable rehearsing. In any case, the big band era was in its death throes by 1954. On top of that, the Sauter-Finnegan band used original, unorthodox arrangements, frequently of offbeat music. A devoted but limited following could not sustain it and, after it inevitably broke up, Eddie Sauter headed for Broadway and Bill Finnegan made his living in Hollywood. As for Liebermann, he became better known as an opera producer.

As we all presumably know, there are no objective aesthetic standards—beauty is indeed in the eye or, in this case, the ear of the beholder. You may believe, as I do, that Mozart was a better composer than, say, Minkus, but there’s no way to prove it. Our reactions to voices are also subjective. I am stating this disclaimer because of the fourth piece on this CD, the Brahms Alto Rhapsody. No, I’m not going to pick at Brahms, Reiner, or Robert Shaw; the fact is, I have never heard a single recording by Marian Anderson that I enjoyed … not one … no matter what kind of music she was singing, and that goes for her three recordings of the Rhapsody. I haven’t heard the one she recorded with Pierre Monteux for many years but, having heard the Ormandy recording and this one, I can easily predict my reaction. Reiner conducts sensitively, the orchestra plays well, the men’s chorus, trained by Robert Shaw, is excellent. Objectively speaking, it’s a good performance that’s being heard by the wrong listener. It’s from late in her career, but if you are an Anderson fan, you will probably like it. Too bad Pristine couldn’t have used the Monteux 78 rpm set’s cover, which was reproduced on Reiner’s LP cover, that of a well-dressed hiker seeing a vision of his beloved’s face in the sky. I kept the LP just for that!

James Miller

This article originally appeared in Issue 35:3 (Jan/Feb 2012) of Fanfare Magazine.