THE WEEK’S RADIO A Great Lieder Singer

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30368, 18 February 1964, Page 9

THE WEEK’S RADIO A Great Lieder Singer

One of the most renowned German sopranos of the first half of this century, Elizabeth Schumann will be heard singing songs by Schubert from 3YC at 7 p.m. on Saturday.

Elisabeth Schumann was equally renowned in the opera and concert. She made her professional debut as a member of the Hamburg Opera in 1909, at the age of 21. She quickly became established and by 1914 she was at the Metropolitan in New York, although curiously this was her only season there. In 1919 she moved to the Vienna State Opera, and Vienna was her home until 1938, when she went to the United States after Hitler’s seizure of power. She toured widely, especially as a recitalist, and she was immensely successful in Britain, where she last appeared in 1947, at the .Edinburgh Festival. She continued to sing almost up to her death in 1952 and even in her 60s her voice lost remarkably little of its clarity and freshness. The eight songs to be heard on Saturday were recorded from 1938 to 1946, and Elisabeth Schumann’s accompanists are Leo Rosenek and Gerald Moore. The songs include three from stage works —the Romance from the incidental music to the play “Rosamunde” and two songs from the Goethe singspiel “Claudine von Villabella,” “This way and that arrows fly” and “Love strays on every pathway.” The British critic, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, has written that no composer lay closer to Elisabeth Schumann’s heart than Schubert. "A Schubert group or two usually occupied the place of honour in her concert programmes and the long tally of her recordings contains far more of Schubert than any other composer. His heartfelt spontaneity must have appealed irresistibly; to her own warm and radiant nature. . . Whatever the mood, her singing was never self-conscious or artificial, but always vivid and spontaneous. Her art, though refined by intimate musicianship and scrupulous study, was constantly refreshed by human sympathy and delight in the visible world,” he says. New Records

Between his last opera, “Fadstaff,” in 1898 and his death in 1901, Giuseppe Verdi continued to write music and he produced four church works, an Ave Maria and a Laudi alia Vergine Mania for unaccompanied chorus, and a Stabart Mater and a Te Deum for chorus and orchestra. Verdi’s Te Deum is a worthy pendant to his great Requiem and it is frequently performed, whereas the other works are neglected. In John Gray’s “New Records” programme from the YC's at 8 pm. tonight, however, listeners may hear a new recording of the Stabart Mater. The performance is by the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra under

Carlo Maria Giulini. The programme will begin with the famous oboeist Leon Gocssens playing a Bach concerto. The work is better known as the Klavier Concerto No. 4 in A, but the scholar Tovey was convinced that it was really written for the oboe d'amore and he made the version that Goossens plays. To complete the programme and to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Elgars death on February 23, the first movement of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 in A, Op. 55 will be broadcast. This recording is by the Philharmcnia Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. Walton Concert On Saturday evening at 8 pm. the YC’s will broadcast the first of Sir William Walton’s concerts with the N.Z.B.C, Symphony Orchestra. Three of his own works will be heard'—the overture, "Portsmouth Point,” written in 1926 when he was 24; Partita for Orchestra, composed to a commission from the Cleveland Orchestra in 1958; and last year’s Variations on a Theme of Hindemith, written in tribute to the great German composer who died recently and who was the soloist in the premiere of Walton’s Viola Concerto in 1929. At 8.8 pm. on Sunday, Sir William Walton will be heard in an interview with Felix Aprahamian of the “Sunday Times.”