When he heard Christopher Lynch sing in Dublin, John McCormack said: "He is the one most likely to succeed me. . . ." For a year before his death last September, Tenor McCormack taught strapping, blue-eyed Tenor Lynch what he knew about singing.
Now 25-year-old-Christy Lynch is the new U.S. music season's most trumpeted visitor. After a cocktail party and supper in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, last week, the young Irishman said: "Sure and I haven't done so bad." For his first radio appearance, the sponsoring Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. filled Carnegie Hall with bigwigs of business and music. Lynch sang such McCormack stock in trade as Macushla, Neapolitan Love Song and Che Gelida Manina from Puccini's La Bohème —and his voice sounded very nearly as clean and sweet, his Irish legato as rippling as McCormack's.
Records & Races. No pure Celt, Christy Lynch was born at Rathkeale on the banks of the Deel, the grandson of a Swiss governess in an aristocratic Irish family. He got his start as a singer in 1942 when he sang from the stage of a Limerick movie theater; the O'Maras, a wealthy meat-packing family in the audience, arranged for him to study in Dublin under McCormack's old teacher.
Last winter Joseph O'Mara flew to the U.S. with five trial recordings of Christy Lynch's voice. He played them for Howard Barlow, an NBC conductor, and Barlow, in turn, played the records over long-distance telephone for Firestone officials in Akron, Ohio. Practically instantaneous result: a one-year contract with Firestone for Lynch to broadcast on alternate Mondays.
In between he will make short concert trips and recordings for RCA Victor, which last month released his first record: Oft in the Stilly Night and Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms. As for opera, Christy Lynch says: "Oh yes, one day I hope to do it. One fine day. But that must wait several years yet."
Meanwhile he has a hobby to pursue. Like John McCormack, Christy Lynch is most eloquent on the subject of horses. "Sure and what I like to do is bet on them," he says. At Belmont Park last week, he examined a racing form: "They're all new to me, but," he confided,. "I can tell from the looks of him how a horse will run." He won $2.*
* For other racing news of the week, see SPORT.