Operatic Soprano

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 402, 7 March 1947, Page 24

Operatic Soprano

HE two words at the head of this paragraph have for many an effect neither soothing nor. uplifting. They may be reminded of that immortal passage in which Mr. Agate, writing of the 1890’s, says: "For better or for worse the world had taken the Wagnerian turn, and large against the Bayreuth sky loomed the bulk of Venus and Brynnhilde, while mighty Elizabeths strode down giant Halls whose pillars rocked at their Greetings, and on the wide champaign Isoldes came to anchor like ten-ton lorries.’ Even if the words do not suggest

this Wellsian pano--rama, they are quite , likely to recall the numerous faults of an art in which dramatic values are subordinated to musical or exist only as their excuse, in which psychological coherence is sacrificed that emotions may be torn from their context and in-

flated into arias and other vocal set pieces and firework displays. But a welcome change, together with proof that these falsities and abuses need not be part of all operatic work, was afforded by a recent 3YA programme of recordings by Joan Cross, who was prominent in the Sadler’s Wells company, and in the first production of Peter Grimes. Miss Cross’s numbers might have been selected as representatives of Opera’s Best Known; each of them was an industriously plugged aria, sung, by a superb act of defying the, fates, in an English translation; and each of them had a battery of sad associations-vocal posturing and over-acting, complete lack of interest in its place in a dramatic whole. But each one Miss Cross sang with a restraint and precision which suggested very definitely that she was used to working in a company where an opera was regarded as a whole in which each piece had a definite part and functioned best as such-as a drama ‘and not as a succession of big moments linked together with perfunctory melodramantics.