Search - Brahms, Reiner, Rpo :: Brahms: Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98

A great Reiner Brahms 4th!

04/21/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"After the loss of their long-time music director, Sir Thomas Beecham (March, 1961), the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra embarked on a series of recordings of classical music's warhorses in 1962 for Reader's Digest. These included big-name conductors such as Reiner, Jascha Horenstein, Charles Munch, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Adrian Boult, and maybe another name or two I cannot remember. This recording was available only in the Reader's Digest box set until it made it briefly on RCA's Gold Seal budget LP label in the late 1970's - early 1980's. It took the small enterprising label of Chesky to obtain the rights and reissue this recording and some of the other Reader's Digest recordings on CD, and the results are interesting.While a great recording performance-wise, recording producer Charles Gerhardt's and engineer Kenneth Wilkinson's approach toward recording Reiner in London's Walthamstow Town Hall is significantly different than Richard Mohr and Lewis Layton in Chicago's Orchestra Hall. There is a decidedly more distant perspective adopted by the Englishmen than their American counterparts. While this does simmer down the large orchestral sound of Mohr/Layton, the one advantage is that a bit more spatial clarity and proper aural perspective among greatly-contrasting instruments (such as a trombone vs. a flute) is realized.The difference between the regular Chesky CD and their gold CD as far as this recording is concerned is minimal, compared to two silver and gold CD Reiner/CSO recordings by RCA that I have of the 1954 Zarathustra and Pictures at an Exhibition. In these two Chicago recordings the difference between the silver and the gold CDs, is more pronounced (with the gold being better) in the Mohr/Layton approach to recording than in the Gerhardt/Wilkinson approach."