Word: tenore
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Behind the patched and faded fed velvet curtain of Philadelphia's elegant Academy of Music (built in 1857 and famed for its acoustics) lives a small brown bat. During Metropolitan Opera visits to the Academy, the bat nearly flew into the broad mouth of Tenor Beniamino Gigli; once it flew rings around Basso Feodor Chaliapin. Last week, by lying low, the bat muffed a punnish chance-a performance of Johann Strauss's bubbling, rollicking The Bat (Die Fledermaus), by the best troupe Philadelphia has had in years...
...best fun. Its singers, chosen from 450 Philadelphians who showed up for auditions, averaged 27 years in age, were well above average in looks. Retranslated, by Chorus Master Vernon Hammond, was the gay, sometimes bawdy Viennese libretto (1874), which details the ballroom deceptions practiced upon a banker (Tenor Edward Nyborg, tailor's son) by his wife (Selma Amansky, wife of the Philadelphia Orchestra's trumpeter and associate conductor, Saul Caston) and his maidservant (Frances Greer, church singer). Typical couplet, sung by the banker...
...good jazz--and Donahue has it. Junie Mays (piano--also some excellent arrangements), Bill Hoffman (bass) and Charlie Carroll on drums do a sweet job besides furnishing the "flash" solos that any band needs these days to satisfy the customers. Stewie McKay, who used to dish out hot tenor, also occasional oinks on the bassoon for Red Norvo, is dispensing for Donahue, as are Sal Pace (alto), Johhny Martel (former Goodman trumpet man), and Miff Sims (trombone), all of whom are good. Paula Kelly and Phil Brito do the vocals, both being personable and good; the former has always been...
Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera "revived" Pelleas for the first time since 1935 (when Edward Johnson, now the Met's manager, sang it with Lucrezia Bori, now retired). For Pelléas, the Metropolitan had engaged a young (36), slim-legged, personable French tenor, Georges Cathelat, a friend of old (77) Maeterlinck who joined the Opera Comique in 1931. Today France's best Pelleas, Cathelat was released from his wartime job in the censor's office at the behest of U. S. Ambassador Bullitt...
...Debussy would never have said, as he did of Mary Garden, that hers was "the gentle voice I had been hearing within me, faltering in its tenderness. . . ." The Metropolitan orchestra, noodling along under Wagnerite Erich Leinsdorf, only occasionally set forth Debussy's score in its full glow. But Tenor Cathelat, a good actor and a good manager of a middling voice, captivated New York's Debussyites - who were out in full cry - and earned critical notices which any operatic censor would be glad to pass...