Word: varnays
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...remainder of the three-week season, Bayreuth will be pure Wagner, with a good many newcomers among the performers. Unlike Furtwängler, neither of the Wagner conductors, Hans Knappertsbusch and Herbert von Karajan, has ever held the festival podium before. Among the new singers: Met Soprano Astrid Varnay (Brünhilde) and U.S. Bass-Baritone George London (Amfortas in Parsifal), who has been a postwar star of the Vienna State Opera (TIME...
...session, Soprano Astrid Varnay offered to spend her free evenings baby-sitting and turn over the money to the Metropolitan Opera Fund. The idea, she said, "came to me in a flash." She even had a good word to say for her babysitting technique: "Treat them like grownups. I usually tell them little stories about my friends and things I have been doing...
Unfortunately, the film's continuity is almost as ragged as its moppets, and just as inclined to make too much of a good thing. But Director Robert Varnay knows how to cut loose a camera for comic effect, and the kids (Jacques Gencel,* Sophie Leclair, De Meulan, et al.) appear human and likable, never consciously cute, and seldom more precocious than a childhood on Montmartre streets might warrant...
...singers did their best to make up for all that. For U.S.-trained Astrid Varnay, The Dutchman was a chance to prove again that she really belongs at the top, and opulent-voiced Soprano Varnay (as Senta) proved it. For German Baritone Hans Hotter, 41 (the Dutchman), it was a brilliant debut. A onetime choir director with a big, barreling but expressive voice, huge (6 ft. 4, 223 Ibs.), handsome Baritone Hotter filled the stage, both vocally and visually...
...insure more thorough rehearsing, he had been talking to the singers about spending more time at the Met. Most of them, he said, including Tenors Jussi Bjoerling and Set Svanholm, Sopranos Astrid Varnay and Dorothy Kirsten, Contraltos Blanche Thebom and Risë Stevens, "have already agreed to work with me . . ." He promised to "make every effort to find the best artists among Americans." But, said he, "where I cannot find them, I will bring in Europeans." Since Edward Johnson's casting assistant, Frank St. Leger, had turned in his resignation, Rudi Bing would do most of the casting himself...