Manhattan music lovers were listening last week to another English girl who sings straight-out.
Two years ago, pretty Contralto Kathleen Ferrier had made a name for herself at Britain's Glyndebourne Opera Festival —and the name was Orfeo. Last week, after her first U.S. performance of Gluck's 187-year-old, seldom heard opera Orfeo ed Euridice, Manhattan operagoers understood why.
In Town Hall, Contralto Ferrier had no topnotch Glyndebourne production behind her, although she did have a familiar Euridice opposite her: U.S. Soprano Ann Ayars, who had sung the role with her in England and on records.#&134; But Conductor Thomas K. Scherman's Little Orchestra (38 players) and 40 singers from the Westminster Choir got into the graceful spirit of Gluck's music with the overture, and stayed in it to the last gaily triumphant note. It was, however, the dramatically restrained passion of Kathleen Ferrier's singing, in a voice that is even and full through its two-octave range, that carried the show. Few had ever heard the familiar aria I Have Lost My Euridice so sumptuously sung.
For Kathleen Ferrier, a Lancashire lass who likes to "keep them guessing a little longer" about her age (best guess: early 30s), Orfeo is "a tremendous emotional experience ... I want to cry all the time." A pianist in her teens, she had never taken a singing lesson until 1940, after she had entered a voice contest on a dare and won it.
Now on the first lap of her second U.S. tour (she sang Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony under Bruno Walter last season), Kathleen finds she has little time now for anything but singing. After her U.S. tour there are two other big engagements on her schedule: 1) Amsterdam, where she will sing Orfeo again with San Francisco's Pierre Monteux conducting, 2) the Edinburgh Festival, where her old coach, Bruno Walter, has promised to be at the piano to accompany her recital.
* Singing a role originally written for a castrato.
#&134; A surprise in the cast: the program's "Louisa Kinlock," who sang the minor role of Amor, turned out to be Ethel Barrymore Colt.