Word: contraltos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Although the operatic baritone and the contralto (whose first cinemappearance is, nevertheless, impressive) handle the skittish libretto like a pair of pouter pigeons, they are quite at home in their singing roles. The Straus melodies (My Hero, Sympathy, the title song, etc.), written originally for a lyric soprano and a tenor, have been rearranged and somewhat streamlined. Better are some of the picture's other tunes, Moussorgsky's Song Of The Flea (courtesy of Mr. Eddy), Saint-Saens' My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice (Miss Stevens), and Wagner's Evening Star (duet...
Orpheus, with eye-filling Jones settings, gave a comparative youngster, yellow-haired Contralto Anna Kaskas, a chance to let loose as the hero. Lofty and noble was Orpheus, but not too much so. Said Music Director Frank St. Leger of the English translation: "We got the Goddamned twaddle...
Virgil Garnett Gaines Thomson, 44, is a chub-cheeked, baldish, chirrupy, witty, exquisitely cultivated native of Kansas City. A piano-prodigious only son, he went to the same high school as Playwight-Critic Richard Lockridge, Contralto Gladys Swarthout, Actor William Powell. Virgil Thomson went to Harvard, where he wore kid gloves to scull on the River Charles, and played the organ in Boston's King's Chapel. He spent a year after graduation on a grant from the Juilliard Foundation, then went to Paris, to go hungry. "I hope," he declared, "I shall never again have to earn...
Beethoven: Missa Solemmis (Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony, with Soprano Jeannette Vreeland, Contralto Anna Kaskas, Tenor John Priebe, Basso Norman Cordon, the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society; Victor; 24 sides; two volumes; $13). Beethoven, a great-souled humanitarian rather than a churchgoer, wrote his Solemn Mass for the installation of an archduke as an archbishop (he finished it three years too late). One of the greatest and most complicated of choral works it receives here a great recording-assembled from three different concert performances in Boston...
Marian Anderson, 33, patrician Negro contralto, daughter of a onetime washerwoman, won the $10,000 Philadelphia Award (founded in 1921 by the late Edward W. Bok), given annually to the person who does most for the community. Contralto Anderson promised the money to "poor, unfortunate, very talented people...