Word: schmalzing
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Melodious Schmalz. Kreisler's technique was sometimes shaky (he had an occasional tendency to slip off key), but the tone was always glowing, the rhythms dynamic, the conceptions full of grandeur. A cultivated man who spoke eight languages and had a scholar's grasp of history, philosophy and mathematics, he brought to every performance a warmth and simplicity that spoke straight through the mind to the heart...
...wide-ranging plot, based on Dello Joio's own scenario, gave Designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian ample scope for lush sets that imparted a sense of grandeur to the opera's five scenes. American Soprano Mary Costa, who played Ninette, sang beautifully but seemed lost in the schmalz-larded story. Only the heroine's quadroon mother, Cleo, superbly sung by Contralto Irene Dalis, took on the dimensions of life-a singular achievement while coping with some embarrassing lyrics: "Love had fled from your white heart, but my black one still lives in its hell...
...When you get older, you get more ambitious," bubbled evergreen Schmalz King Rudolph Friml, who at 81 still takes a daily dip in the chilly Pacific, follows it up with five minutes of handstands and six hours at the piano. Convinced that "everyone is tired of unmelodious music," Friml hopes that his first new operetta since 1934, a "real Frenchie" confection called Rendezvous in Paris, will tinkle onto Broadway during the coming season...
...comeback it was not Sunset Boulevard. But when Eddie sang People Will Say We're in Love and So Far, the Rodgers and Hammerstein schmalz was chicken fat of the highest quality. He threw Yiddish words into the German version of Mack the Knife and kept a straight face while delivering Never on Sunday in Greek (Spyros Skouras had sent a telegram spelling out the lyrics...
...brass, did not weaken the motion of the other parts. Chorus, orchestra and soloists blended easily, the trumpets and horns penetrating the luminous tone of the chorus but never over-powering it. The chorus's enunciation was perfect throughout. As in the Faure, here there was no schmalz, and Richard Burgin's violin solo in the Aeterna Fac was even perhaps too clipped...