Fritz Reiner (conductor)
Rarities - Volume Three
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894)
Nocturnes: Nuages; Fêtes (1897-99)
Danse (Tarantelle styrienne) (1890, orch. Ravel 1922)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2 (1909)
La Valse (1920)
Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1924)
Oscar Levant (piano)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
La damnation de Faust: Hungarian March (1846)
Oscar Levant (piano)
Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York (Prélude, Nocturnes)
CBS Symphony Orchestra (Daphnis)
Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Honegger)
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (Danse, La valse, Berlioz)
rec. Pittsburgh and New York, 1939-45
PRISTINE AUDIO PASC438 [72]
Daphnis et Chloé's "Dawn" tells you everything about this album's sound quality in a nutshell (or a dawn). The bubbling woodwind textures at the start are so full and liquid that I momentarily thought I was hearing stereo. (This can happen on Pristine's historical resuscitations.) The textures expand impressively, until the peak itself arrives: it's comparatively thin and narrow, in an AM-radio way. Later on, the high violins are apt to be edgy.
So it goes, as they say. This release credits both of the label's luminaries: Mark Obert-Thorn as "producer and audio restoration engineer," Andrew Rose for "additional restoration and pitch stabilization." Where the original recordings are good, these two elicit the best possible results - the solo horn is nicely present, the reeds in the Faune forward - but even they can't add anything that isn't already there.
This collection of revived recordings extends our knowledge of Reiner. His RCA catalogue took in a couple of LPs' worth of Ravel and Debussy - though not the items included here - and certainly no Berlioz or Honegger. (To be fair, RCA had Munch in Boston covering much of that territory.) It's good to hear that the clarity, dignity, and restraint that the conductor brought to the Central European staples benefit the French repertoire equally well.
In fact, I was surprised to discover that Reiner conducted the 1927 U.S. premiere of Honegger's Concertino, which is marked by clean lines and textures. The insouciant first movement turns abruptly menacing; the brief Larghetto sostenuto recalls the Poulenc of Carmelites. The angular, mysterious finale, suggesting a shaken-and-stirred Gershwin, could almost be from a different piece altogether. Oscar Levant, a Hollywood darling, projects the piano part with clarity and lightness, providing incisive rhythms as needed.
RCA originally issued the two major Debussy works anonymously in its "World's Greatest Music" series - odd to think of an eminence like Reiner contributing to such. The conductor's no-nonsense manner in Faune nonetheless allows the soloists plenty of room to inflect, and to separate phrases. Accents are unexpectedly cushiony, and, despite the hint of haste, the reading actually runs a few seconds longer than Ernest Ansermet's cool, classic Decca account. The two Nocturnes used frequently to be played by themselves when a chorus was not available for the Sirènes movement. In Nuages, the wind chords are pleasingly liquid. At the start of the brisk Fêtes, the triplets aren't clean, but the melody clarifies the shape; the procession bit slows just slightly, and almost immediately picks back up.
The aforementioned Daphnis suite was "released...for the entertainment of servicemen [sic] during World War II," as Mr. Obert-Thorn notes. After day has finished breaking, the Pantomime is grounded and steady. The Danse générale is noteworthy for Reiner's shaping of subsidiary figurations, although ir lumbers heavily towards the finish. As for La valse, you have to strain a bit to hear the opening bass bars, but Reiner plays it with elegant grace, picking up tempo at the brassy interjections.
The Tarantelle and the Berlioz march, the two throwaway pieces, sound like it. Reiner takes both at lickety-split tempi, too fast for intelligibility. In the march, he has to slow down drastically for the "B" section, ratcheting back up for the recapitulation, and engages in a number of further rhetorical manipulations. He doesn't believe any of it for a second, and neither do I.
I'd mostly known Reiner from his Chicago stereo discography, so I'm glad to have heard these recordings, which offer a fuller picture.
Stephen Francis Vasta
stevedisque.wordpress.com/blog
