Limited 14CD set. When the 50-year-old Fritz Reiner was appointed conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1938, he was still relatively unfamiliar in his adopted American homeland. This pupil of Bartók at the Academy of Music in his native Budapest, former conductor of the Dresden Royal Opera, where he worked with Richard Strauss, and for the past 16 years music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was still rarely mentioned in the national press and never in record reviews.
Fritz Reiner was one of the foremost conductors of his time. Crowning his long career in Europe and America was the decade from 1954 to 1963 as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra an illustrious partnership that ranks along such other historical tenures as Karajan's in Berlin, Szell's in Cleveland and Bernstein's in New York.
Luckily for posterity, Reiner's legendary interpretations at the helm of the Chicago Symphony which no less than Igor Stravinsky called "the most precise and flexible orchestra in the world" were captured on record by RCA Victor. Now for the first time ever, they are being issued together in a single Sony Classical box set of 63 re-mastered CDs.
La Dame de mes Songes, Dulcinea, as sung by Alexandre Arnoux and Jacques Ibert in the third of the four Songs of Don Quixote (1932), is La Dame de mes songes. It could also be Spain, as dreamed of, at least occasionally from the 1830s to the 1930s, by most French composers who usually reduced it to Andalusia and what they believed to be flamenco. If they stop over in Andalusia, the performers of this disc also travel to Old Castile, Extremadura and Murcia with the help of composers such as Henri Collet, Federico García Lorca, Emiliana de Zubeldía or Raoul Laparra and Jacques Ibert.
Back by popular demand, The Toscanini Collection is a reissue of RCA's 1992 compendium that encompassed all of the recordings Toscanini made with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and NBC Symphony. A new addition to this amazing collection is his approved recordings with the BBC Symphony from the 1930s that were not included in the 1992 edition.