Mixed Grill
B SUNDAY SHOWCASE offered strange bedfellows last week, Echoes of the Golden Age of Opera somewhat mysteriously linked with the first canto of Byron’s Don Juan. The operatic snippets, recorded between 1901 and 1903 at actual performances in New York, had a tinny, scratchy splendour, if only because, amid the crackle and fizz of the execrable recordings, one could descry, tarnished by time, the unmis-
takable outline of an Age of Gold. As Melba executed a phenomenal trill, and flew from it to rest securely on a long top D, the salvos of applause réminded me that great singing then occupied much the same area of public esteem that all-in wrestling does now. James Robertson compered this fascinating programme with the high stylishness that he can do so well. I enjoyed his sly digs at operatic conventions, conveying in his piquant way that the operatic world is at once dotty and sublime. As for the Byron, I thought it very tedious, Byronic humour consists, it seems to me, in a conscientious bathos, the assembling of a stfing of portentous images, which are then ruthlessly punctured in the last two lines of the stanza. To bring this off with precision demands an exact sense of style which eludes Tyrone Power. And I don’t wish to sound snobbish, but I found his intonations most wearing. "Nowadays," said Oscar Wilde at his most wilful, "the English and Americans have everything in common: except, of course, the language." Amen.
B.E.
G.M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 27
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249Mixed Grill New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 27
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