Word: ballades
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...program opened with the dreamy old song, Won't You Wait Till the Cows Come Home, accented by the tinkle of a cowbell and the recorded moo of a Jersey heifer. It closed with a gooey, sentimental ballad called Contented, sung by a weepy-voiced tenor ("I'm on heaven's own doorstep, so contented with you"). Between the moo and the mush, the Carnation Milk Co. poured out a half hour of semi-classical music as thick and sweet as its product. To keep its Contented Hour flowing smoothly, Carnation also hired such big names...
Last week, NBC's Contented Hour, one of radio's oldest and best-known, began its 15th year. But it was almost a new show. Gone were the moo and the bell, the bleating ballad. Only familiar prop was Canadian-born, 36-year-old Conductor Percy Faith. Regarded as one of radio's top arrangers, he is equally deft with light classics and new jazz. His formula for a new contentment: more Kostelanetz-like arrangements of Gershwin and Rodgers, fewer old soothers like Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes...
...hard little heel, besides dancing her nimble feet off. Mitzi Green (Babes in Arms) plays the part and catches the color of a Texas Guinan. There is a wonderful takeoff of a big Ziegfeldish production number in which showgirls appear as bright-plumaged birds. There is a funny ballad in which a gangster reminisces about his rubbed-out pals. Most of Jerome Robbins' dances are lively and amusing; some of Morton Gould's tunes are witty, if not very tuneful...
...City Slickers played Chloe straight, with all the tom-toms and jungle mating cries that everybody else affects, then gave it the business ("Chloe - where are you, you old bat you?"). They caught the nagging, namby-pamby nonsense of Glow-Worm. Their Cocktails for Two, to a 1934 sob ballad, was such a jukebox favorite that Victor made 150,000 pressings with it on both sides - so that as soon as one side wore out the other side could be played to death...
...Malcolm Cowley, offered a translated selection from among four of the six volumes of verse which this facile versifier wrote in France during and after the German occupation. Aragon was celebrated in this volume as the laureate of the Maquis. In English these poems, intensely patriotic, often loose and ballad-like, richly embellished with surrealist imagery, are eloquent, interesting, but difficult to assess as poetry. The detached reader is likely to wonder whether Aragon is being canonized with too little regard for Jean Cocteau's cynical observation: "In French poetry there is only one rhyme: La France...