Little if any of Reinecke’s extensive output is likely
to be remembered today. He pursued a highly successful career as a piano
virtuoso, composer and teacher in Scandinavia and Paris, and at the
Cologne and Leipzig Conservatories. He became a much-respected director
and chief conductor at the latter. A prolific composer as well as a
writer of composer biographies and theoretical essays he was named by
the German musicologist Hugo Riemann as "the most extraordinary
personality from Leipzig’s world of music", Reinecke was a minor
representative of the famous "Leipzig school" of composers
that included Mendelssohn, and among his Leipzig students were Grieg,
Sullivan, and Weingartner. His works are solidly based on classical
forms and, though occasionally innovative, might, even in his own day,
have been considered somewhat conventional in style. Though the music
is melodious and well-constructed, it is, perhaps, not surprising that
it has failed to survive in the status of such contemporaries as Mendelssohn,
Schumann and Brahms.
The six-movement Serenade could fairly be called "light
music" (which ought not to suggest that it is uninteresting music)
or, maybe less fairly, "teashop music". The alternation of short
playful/soulful movements make for easy listening; but, compared with,
say, Elgar’s or Eric Coates’ excursions into this genre, the word that
comes more readily to mind is "insipid".
The twelve Tonbilder (tone poems), assembled late in
life from earlier compositions, are really little more than a set of
"character" pieces, mostly short – a mere two or three
minutes – and despite their fancy titles could easily be played
(as they are here) as a suite for string orchestra. The Children’s Symphony
is, if its opus number is anything to go by, a fairly mature work, and
turns out to be a jolly romp full (as is Haydn’s "Toy" Symphony)
of cuckoo calls, whistles, tin drums and the like. To be perfectly honest
I found it the most engaging work on this disk.
The Kremlin players enter into the spirit of the thing,
but even their indulgent vibrato and persistent portamento do not succeed
in making this disc more than a charming curiosity.
Roy D. Brewer
Chamber Orchestra Kremlin/Misha
Rachlevsky