Children Singing

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 11

Children Singing

|] HAVE always admired very greatly : the children’s singing, directed by T. J. Young, of the Wellington Teachers’ Training College, in the Broadcasts to Schools session. The two broadcasts with which he ended this year’s performances, however, were highlights in listening. In them he had the assistance of Alex Lindsay’s string orchestra, led by Ruth Pearl, a splendid combination to accompany the limpid purity of youthful voices. The whole effect was enchanting. Surely such singing could be recorded for rebroadcast in the evening, to give pleagure to those people who cannot listen in the early afternoon. The songs were chosen with impeccable taste and gave a wide variety-from folk song through the standard classics: to the delightful little children’s songs by Alec Rowley. The singing was pure and crisply rhythmical, but there was one small blemish. Whenever the children had several notes to sing legato to one syllable they gave each note with a small explosion of the breath amounting almost to an interpolated consonant. This is so difficult and unnatural that the children seemed to have been trained to do it. The effect is disastrous, mot perhaps so much in bright rhythmi¢al numbers like "The Mermaid," as in "Away in a Manger" where surely a

legato flow is essential.

D.

M.