A timely celebration of a "double" 50-year anniversary. . A half century ago, I was a junior in high school. We used to have these gatherings called "assemblies," where the principal would collect the entire student body in the auditorium (no excuses allowed!) for an event of more than passing importance. At this late date, I can only remember a small handful of them: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, President Truman relieving General MacArthur of his command. Oh, and one where two fellows from Ampex came to our high school to give a little demonstration of something called "stereophonic sound," using, needless to say, an Ampex tape recorder.    And the music for this demonstration? It was the brief opening prologue ("Sunrise") from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra," in this very same Reiner/Chicago Symphony Orchestra recording. This was a "sneak preview to end all sneak previews," inasmuch as the monophonic LP ("New Orthophonic," I believe it was called) hadn't even been released at that early date. And, needless to say, this impressionable teenager was suitably impressed. So much so that, in the years to come, I acquired three LPs of the performance: the original monophonic LP, then the Living Stereo LP a few years later, and eventually, when the stereo LP had seen its better days, the Dynagroove rerelease (something I'd just as soon forget). I never did go the reel-to-reel route, and, when CDs eventually made their appearance, I opted for other performances of these two Strauss works rather than the earlier conventional Living Stereo CD release. But I always did have fond memories of that particular reel-to-reel tape demonstration back in '54; it was a direct copy of the 30ips master tape, and not the 7.5ips "consumer" version that came out shortly thereafter.    With BMG now releasing half-century-old Living Stereo classics as hybrid SACDs (10 at present, with surely more on the way), it was easy for me to select this recording as one of the first to sample. I was more than pleasantly surprised; just listening to the "Also Sprach Zarathustra" prologue had the effect of turning the clock back 50 years; truly a trip down Memory Lane!    In a phrase, I wasn't disappointed. Even listening to the conventional CD layer, it was easy to get the sense that there I was again, listening to the 30ips master tape. Even with headphones, I heard no evidence of tape hiss; just beautifully balanced stereo sound with a tremendous sense of not only left-to-right spatial array but depth as well. (This is particularly evident in "The hero's battlefield" segment of "Ein Heldenleben," where the initial muted trumpet fanfares sound as if they are coming from well behind the orchestra.) Throughout both massive tone poems, the music is well-served by RCA's "minimalistic" microphoning, with just two mikes picking up the sound field, and every single instrumental voice (and there are many of them) can clearly be heard. (Sir Thomas Beecham, that evergreen source of bon mots, reserved one of his best for "Ein Heldenleben" when he wrote that "I once spent a couple of days in a train with a German friend. We amused ourselves by discovering how many notes we could take out of 'Ein Heldenleben' and leave the music essentially intact. By the time we finished we had taken out fifteen thousand.")    As for Reiner's interpretations, perhaps the simplest way of putting it is that there is no time in the last half century that I can recall when these two performances were NOT included in EVERY "essential recordings" discography (even when the sound quality was not as it is here, in the hybrid SACD release). Reiner had a way of not oversentimentalizing these two works, as if they had been the products of one of the world's greatest egos, which, in fact, they were: Strauss made no bones about himself being the hero of "Ein Heldenleben." Reiner keeps things moving along, lest they bog down for the empty rhetoric that they can often be in lesser hands.    A century ago, when Strauss had been the most famous composer who was also a conductor and Gustav Mahler had been the most famous conductor who was also a composer, audiences couldn't get enough of the Strauss tone poems. (I think, in fact, that the record will show that Mahler conducted Strauss's tone poems more frequently than he did his own symphonies!)    And a half-century ago, when I had been in my musical adolescence, so to speak, I too couldn't get enough of them. But they haven't worn all that well in the intervening years. Now, considerably older and modestly wiser, I can only take them in infrequent doses. (Perhaps I've simply taken Strauss at his word when he described himself as "a first-rate second-rate composer.") And, fortunately for this now-jaded me, these Reiner performances, long perfect in everything but sound quality, have arrived with, finally, sound quality that matches the performances.    I have every expectation that future "essential  recordings" discographies will continue to include these performances, now with this newly-refurbished sound quality that is the match of any.    Bob Zeidle
Output: POS