Second Serving

The Metropolitan Opera, with the notable help of its new conductor Fritz Reiner, had made a good many of its critics eat their words with a great performance of Salome (TIME, Feb. 14). Last week, the Met and its Maestro Reiner served them another mouthful--and let a nationwide radio audience in on it, too.

This time, pudgy Conductor Reiner had no sensational Salome to work with. For his second opera, the Met hauled out of storage a number that takes elbow grease and even more finesse: Verdi's last, perhaps greatest but hardly popular opera, the ephemeral, fast-moving Falstaff.

Reiner didn't get quite the cast he had in mind, but the cast he faced across the footlights was one that no conductor could kick about: big-voiced Leonard Warren as the fat Sir John himself, brilliant young Giuseppe Valdengo, who made his first big U.S. splash as Lago in Toscanini's 1947 broadcast of Otello, Soprano Licia Albanese and Mezzo Cloe Elmo.

What he did with them, and the way they sang and acted for him when the curtain was up would be remembered a while at the Met. The orchestra was elegantly incisive, and the singers were spiritedly convincing. The critics' consensus: Reiner had done it again.

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