The
RCA Living Era series has resurrected a classic Scheherazade
on SACD, coupled with Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol. Neither will
offer many, if any, surprises by now though the new format offers
its own frisson. Reiner was seventy-two when he took Scheherazade
into Orchestra Hall to make this recording and had only two
years more to live. The reading is sensuous and warm, lithe
and enveloping but also perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic. Though
some critics tend to tout this recording it doesn’t really,
in interpretative matters, quite measure up to, say, Beecham
or Kletzki, to take two other classics from that period. There
are too many disjunctive caesuri in the opening movement, too
many metrical displacements that just call attention to themselves
too boldly. Of course Frank Miller, section leading cellist
supreme, is on hand in the second movement – his poignant diminuendi
offer tutorship to any singer, let alone string players, and
Ray Still’s oboe is here eloquence personified. But isn’t there
just too much dawdling from around 8.40 – added to which despite
the revamped sound the climax isn’t penetrating or jubilant
enough. Some of the phrasing in the third movement borders on
the mannered, though the percussion is very well caught and
the finale erupts in fast-tonguing brass and acrobatic, balletic
flute and wind playing. Throughout in fact the orchestral playing
is at a very high level.
This
spills over in the Stravinsky, made four years earlier, and
with the same complement of fine principals. I especially admired
the flute playing in The Song of the Nightingale and
the powerful rhythm Reiner evinces throughout, one of his most
invincible qualities.
The
booklet reprints in the main the original LP liner notes and
the jewel case has an added surprise. You need to press slightly
harder to open it; it has a kind of plastic clasp built in.
This of course a SACD, to which I could only listen on an ordinary
set up.
Jonathan
Woolf
82876 66377 2
