One of the triumphs in the career of Dr. John Doolittle, Hugh Lofting's hero who mastered the language of the animals, was the formation of an opera company consisting entirely of canaries and other singing birds. Readers who have wondered ever since what the bird stars sounded like got a hint last week at the Berlin Festival in a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. Occasion: the première of French Composer Olivier Messiaen's Réveil des Oiseaux, an 18-minute atonal orchestral work consisting mainly of the songs of 38 different forest...
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