Gershwin: Porgy And Bess Metropolitan Opera Orchestra

The Art of Renée Fleming is essentially an album of the soprano's most popular hits, probably not targeted at listeners who are already big fans (who are likely to already have the albums from which these selections were culled), but at more general audiences interested in expanding their operatic horizons. With a few very familiar exceptions, the songs and arias are from the Romantic and post-Romantic eras, and showcase the luxurious creaminess of Fleming's voice and her ability to spin out melodic lines with seamless, soaring lyricism.

This Renée Fleming disc, By Request, is mostly a compilation of previously released material. There are three new tracks, "Ah fors' è lui" from Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, the song "Cäcille" by Richard Strauss, and "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Rogers & Hammerstein's musical Carousel. The new recordings all sound fine, and Fleming is outstanding in the re-issued pieces as well. If you have the prior incarnations of these recordings, you may elect to pass on this collection unless you want the three new tracks.

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.