Word: tourel
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...hours, she put her Spokane audience through a program that jumped from Handel to Reynaldo Hahn. At the end of an earnest evening, Jennie Tourel finally let the lowbrows in the audience have Songs My Mother Taught Me, My Hero (from The Chocolate Soldier), and a piece of heavy whimsy by Leonard Bernstein, called I Hate Music. Two nights later she sang in the little college town of Pullman, Wash., and half the town turned out to hear...
...four top recitalists singing in the U.S. today, Jennie Tourel is the youngest, the least known and perhaps the most versatile.* Lotte Lehmann, still a great trouper at 58, sings German lieder; England's tiny Maggie Teyte, no longer up to her old grand opera roles, has made a new hit singing delicate French songs. The great contralto Marian Anderson balances Schubert and Brahms with Negro spirituals. But Jennie Tourel sings exhaustive programs in seven languages (English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), and three vocal ranges (soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto). Says she: "[The audiences] understand that...
...Jennie Tourel is the daughter of a traveling Russian businessman and "was born in Montreal by accident." She lived most of her life in Paris. At first, studying singing, she couldn't agree with a voice teacher who "put me in the mouth some kind of apparatus to teach me voice production." Then she found a coach who told her to sing as if she were reciting a poem, and that solved phrasing...
...Stokowski chose her to sing the mezzo-soprano solo in the U.S. premiere of Prokofiev's cantata, Alexander Nevsky. Says Jennie: "All of a sudden everything came to me." After her Town Hall debut in 1943, the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson wrote: "Miss Tourel's conquest . . . was . . . without any local parallel since Kirsten Flagstad's debut at the Metropolitan Opera House some nine seasons...
...Jennie Tourel's phenomenal range, from low G to high C, is three notes wider than the average mezzo-soprano's. Says Jennie of herself: "The voice can be like a violin, it can be like a viola, it can be like a cello...