CONTEMPORARY ARTS
MUSIC
VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES has sung twice at the Proms. in the last week and has delighted her audiences again by the firm- ness and purity of her tone and the unusual colour of the voice which she uses with such admirable skill and taste. She has sung German and French, as well as Spanish music ; but neither Richard Strauss nor Gounod showed her at her best. In her Spanish songs she seems to be wholly and naturally employed, her voice and manner respond to every inflexion of the music and the text and there is no hint of a carefully prepared manner or a studied role. Her Standchen, Morgen and Clicilie, on the other hand, seemed insufficiently felt, perhaps not wholly grasped emotionally. It is partly a question of the difficult mezzo- soprano range and quality of her voice, which take the shine out of the climaxes in the top register ; and partly a more subtle something, a failure quite to identify the very Spanish singer with the very German Cacily and the very French Marguerite— a faihire of which Mme. de los Angeles' indifferent German and French pronunciation is probably only another symptom. So definite a musical character as she displays in her Spanish songs ig not easily put aside or disguised, nor could anyone wish that character to be in any way diminished ; but what is gained in intensity is almost inevitably lost in extension. '
The two new works of the week were an organ concerto by Leo Sowerby and an overture, May Day, by Benjamin Frankel. Of the concerto I fmd it difficult to write. Written in a flashy and eclectic style, its harmonic idiom was often simply that of Delius—an idiosyncratic composer as dangerous to imitate as Debussy—and it demanded a brilliant, " all out " style or organ- playing which I personally find singularly repellent. That within its limits it was effectively written, and that it was admir- ably played by E. Power Biggs, I am quite prepared to admit.
Frankel in his overture attempted a task which composers of an earlier generation reScrved to the symphonic poem. The composer called his work a panorama, a term which has indeed strayed far from anything connected with an overture in its original etymological sense. It was the compressing of material for a conspectus into a form designed for something more like a prospectus that accounted for a certain air of inconsequence in
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