Word: ference
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Carousel (20th Century-Fox). In the years between the wars, European audiences licked their lips over Liliom, the play by Ferenc Molnar. What they liked about its flavor was the salt. U.S. theater goers did the same over Carousel, the musical that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made from the play in 1945, but what they liked about its flavor was the sugar-the pretty pink icing of the plot, and most of all the sunny flowing honey of the lovely Rodgers tunes. The melodies have all their clovered freshness still, but if film fans lick their lips over anything...
...week's best prospect was Ferenc Molnar's The Good Fairy, produced by Maurice Evans on Hallmark Hall of Fame (Sun. 4 p.m., NBC). For a while it looked as if three expert players could bring off the tender, sophisticated, 25-year-old Hungarian fantasy about a "little glowworm" usherette (Julie Harris) who wants to be a good fairy to a highly moral but impoverished lawyer (Walter Slezak), is pursued by an immensely wealthy but engagingly unethical Lothario (Cyril Ritchard), and winds up in the arms of her own true love. But in a quarter of a century...
Hallmark Hall of Fame (Sun. 4 p.m., NBC). Maurice Evans presents Ferenc Molnar's The Good Fairy, starring Julie Harris, Walter Slezak...
Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 3 (Monique Haas; Berlin's RIAS Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ferenc Fricsay; Decca). Bartok was racing death when he composed this strongly appealing work, because he wanted to leave his pianist-wife something to play for her living. (He died in 1945 with the last few bars uncompleted.) French Pianist Haas is up against some stiff competition from other recorded versions, but, perhaps because the concerto was written for a woman, her delicately imaginative performance is hard to beat...
Rossini: Stabat Mater (Maria Stader, Marianna Radev, Ernst Häfliger, Kim Borg; RIAS Symphony conducted by Ferenc Fricsay; Decca, 2 LPs). The composer who was once advised by Beethoven to stick to comic opera, here turns up in a churchly (if not always churchlike) mood. The chorus sings some lofty and properly devotional counter point, but the lovely solo voices have arias that bounce and flow with the joyfulness of the Barber of Seville. Performance: elegant...