MU S IC THE autumn season at Sadler's Wells opened on August
20th and caught a large and appreciative audience, still holiday-minded and very well suited by Wolf-Ferrari's School for Fathers. The temper of this music and the sort of characterisation demanded by the libretto are naturally congenial to English singers and to an English audience. The music is neither thin and flippant nor portentous and insurmountable ; it is tuneful without being passionate and sweet without sickliness.
I am never quite convinced by Professor'Dent's very clever trans- position of the scene from Venice to London. It not only raises difficult points for the producer—there is, for instance, a great difference between washing hung up to dry on a Venetian roof- garden and a clothes-line in a back-garden in the City; a suggestion of social differences which make the friendship between the three women most improbable. But the women themselves are, in their music, unmistakably un-English, and the richest alderman's wife could never have paraded her cicisbeo among her friends, even
if she had the English equivalent of that very &Italian officer in her household The men, being boors, and either laconic or pompous in their manners, are not more Italian than they are English, and Miss Crusty certainly transposes admirably into a sly English miss. Marion Studholme's playing and singing of this part was the triumph of the evening, and stood out even in the excellent casting of the other parts. The fathers were admirably characterised and sung, and if George James could make his words more audible he, Howell tSlynyne, Hervey Alan and Stanley Clarkson would make an almost ideal quartet. Of their wives, Anna Pollak and Marion Lowe make excellent Italian Englishwomen, and Kate JackSon provides a ballast of international good humour which helps to conceal the anomalies in the anglicised version of the story.
Madame Butterfly at the same theatre on August 24th was a triumph for Amy Shuard. The bright colour and dramatic range and strength of her voice are magnificent in the great climaxes of the second and third acts ; but it is worrying to her sincerest admirers that her voice is most effective when used fortissimo in the top register and that her middle register, especially in piano passages, is comparatively thin in quality and undistinguished in tone. Is there not a great danger of over-working this most gifted singer and, instead of developing her slowly—and also surely—into a quite exceptional dramatic soprano, is not the Sadler's Wells management playing unscrupulously for quick results and running the risk of spoiling a really fine_ voice?
Rowland Jones was a very British Pinkerton, not the Italian- American cynical womaniser imagined by Illica and Giacosa—and Puccini. He sang well but without the naturalness or the sentimental abandon demanded by the music. Arnold Matters seems to me mis- cast as Sharpless, a naturally heroic singer moving uneasily among the. drinks and cigarettes, though he is unfailingly musical. Olwen Price, too, -is a character-singer always, I felt, on the verge of guying Suzuki (and once, in the flower-arranging duet, actually transgressing, no doubt unintentionally), thangh she rose to the full dramatic stature of the part in Act 3. The production as a
whole seemed weak on the lyrical side. MARTIN COOPER.
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