Non Angeli, sed Angeles
AY I cheat a little this week, and admit that I not only heard Victoria de los Angeles in two solo recitals, but
saw her also? And may I try to give an idea of what that total experience amounts to? I think it true to say that no singer has made a like impact on our imaginations since the memorable visits of Ninon Vallin some years ago. Both share the gift of creating an indescribable ambience round each song; of summoning inexplicably a whole world of feeling to surround them. In one of Vallin’s ripe years, it amounted to sorcery to hear ‘her sing of a young girl going breathless to meet her lover by a lake; sorcery, because she turned by some alchemy into that girl before our eyes. Victoria de los Angeles does not astound us in quite this way because she is young and beautiful, and so we need no sorcery. Yet what else is it that holds an audience of 2500 so rapt, so absorbed, held by a radiant personality in the strongest,: yet most delicate relationship? I found her, finally, adorable; I can hardly say more. She is so complete an artist: no detail escapes her. Her dresses, for example; at one concert she wore a tent of red silk, and when she sat down at the end with her guitar, she was a Velasquez or a Murillo come to life. On Saturday, she was a vivid green bel], with two pink roses on her breast. As for her art, it is so various that in these brief notes I can recall only what impressed me most profoundly. The line of Schumann’s Nussbaum, for example, drawn out like a thread of purest silk, the ravishing, melting tone of Respighi’s Stornellatrice, the vigour and brio _of her Spanish songs. Other singers can sing lieder or early French songs as well, no doubt, but in her Spanish songs she is unique. A fragrance has hung-on the air while she has been with us. And how fortunate for Maurice Till to be associated with such an artist! And how splendidly, in what fine taste, he accom(continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) panied her. The NZBS has given us the prize of the season. All I can hope is that they will soon do it again.
B.E.G.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 16
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396Non Angeli, sed Angeles New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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