In Columbia’s “Disc Digest” magazine for Sept, 1948, there is a brief article by Reiner promoting the the-new microgroove LP, “From Cylndrical to Long Playing Records.”

It begins,

“My first recording session in Budapest, some decades ago, was not without its thrills.  Although I was only 18  (it would thus be 1906), I was already conducting at the opera and also accompanying a good many singers.  In a hot little studio, whose sole sound-proofing consisted of a shut door, I played the piano accompaniments for a soprano whose name I have forgotten.  We considered it a great event to make cylindrical records which would be reproduced in quantity.  There was no microphone in those days;  the piano was set as close as possible to an enormous horn, three or four feet in diameter and about eight feet in length...the recording mechanism was completely hidden.  Not until more than a week later was I able to hear the recordings that we had made. “

He talks about how tinny they sounded and compare it with- well, you know.  

Has anyone linked Reiner’s piano playing to any c. 1906 recordings of the soprano who he forgot or any others?  

And, by the way, is the article really by Reiner?  I recall sitting in Pete Munves’ office at Columbia in the mid-1950s as he dictated telegrams of apology for non-attendance at some event in the names of (and in the accents of) many of Columbia’s major classical performers.  What this a write-up of some imaginary recording session by a Columbia employee using Reiner’s name to promote the new LP?

Steve Smolian