American Broadcast Performances 1942-1952

BUZZ: Reiner is still celebrated as the conductor’s conductor by colleagues en tout, a legend in his own time who has re-emerged as one in ours. Reiner was not a born performing musician, for he was no showman and had no intention of playing to the gallery. He respected listeners’ aural attention and cared little about being regarded as a famous maestro or a celebrity. Radio broadcasts and commercial recordings were therefore an ideal medium for his conducting. Listeners could then concentrate on his faithful projection of musical scores without the distraction of nonmusical phenomena. Reiner expected listeners to have an educated interest in the musical and social context of the music he performed, in keeping with the high cultural traditions of the central European milieu in which he was steeped. The repertoire displayed here indicates his ability to communicate strong musical interpretations which repay repeated hearings. The indefinable quality associated with performing music at concerts breathes life into these performances. Though Reiner made well-known commercial recordings of more than half the works represented here, these live readings inject an extra sense of urgency and occasion into the proceedings. The main hallmarks of Reiner’s conducting are displayed consistently throughout these CDs: a concern for precise, idiomatic articulation and phrasing in varied repertoire; attention to the different periods and styles of music; a superior ability to balance all sections of an orchestra, from the treble instruments to the bass, across a wide dynamic spectrum; a strong sense of forward momentum, vivid pacing, and textural and agogic subtlety. Whatever one feels about individual performances on these discs, no-one could listen to them and accuse Reiner, as some glib critics have done, of being a remote or cold interpreter of great technical capacity but with no great feeling for the music performed. “A collector’s treasure trove”. — Rob Cowan in Gramophone