GRAMOPHONE NOTES
There are two beautiful Verdi recordings—Lina Pagliughi's Sul d'un sofilo, from Falstaff (Part.), and Boris Christoff's Ella giannainfamo, from Don Carlos (H.M.V.). These are both, to my mind, on the highest modern level, and should be heard by all lovers of Italian opera. Ebe Stignani is a fine artist with a magni- ficent voice, but her two Gluck recordings (Part.) quite fail to establish the right, or indeed any definite, style. Milhaud's Ronsard songs sung by Lily Pons (Col.) are pretty quirks for the connoisseur ; but less sophisticated taste will prefer Jan Peerce singing the Yiddish Plea to God (H.M.V.), which is very fine in its sultry, near-hysterical way, or the pretty trifles sung in Welsh by David Lloyd and in " Ukrainian " (?Little- or Malo-Russian) dialect by Eugenia Zareska (Decca). Two Schumann songs by Schlusnus and part of Meister- singer, Act 2, Scene 4, sung by Maria Reinig and Paul Schoeffler (Decca), sounded very lifeless to me, though the actual voices are obviously good.
Beethoven's Septet is played by members of the Viennese Octet (Decca), who are plainly very much at home in it. M.C.
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