HOME AGAIN.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 248, 19 October 1908, Page 6

HOME AGAIN.

After five years' absence from her native Australia, Mm©. Ada Crossley, the celebrated contralto singer, is back again in Sydney. The members of her company are Mr John Harrison, the foremost English tenor of today; Mr Hamilton Earle, England's ! representative concert baritone; Mr | Leon Sametini, a distinguished young violinist, and Mr Percy Grainger, the | best-known Australian pianist in the j Old World. It must be with curiouslymingled feelings that an artiste who | has won to so brilliant a position in ! the world of music returns to her own country, and Mme. Ada Crossley showed something that was in her heart when, speaking to an English interviewer recently, she said that she longed to see once again the old cottage among the eucalyptus trees, the old friends who encouraged her to enter upon her career. "Above aH," she confessed, "I go in the hope of securing the reward I prize most of all, the applause of my own people." Like Patti and Sims Reeves, the choir stalls of a church was the place from which Mme. Crossley first lifted her wonderful voice. Rev. Henry Howard, who was recently in England as an Australian representative to the British Methodist Conference, told an English audience the other day that Mme. Crossley used to play the organ and lead the singing at the church over whose services he presided. "When she returned to Australia in after years, crowned with all the honors that England had placed upon her brow," said Mr Howard, "I found her still the same unspoiled Ada Crossley, whom I knew as a girl." This is more of a tribute than appears upon the surface. The heads of many singers have been turned with less than half the success than that achieved by Mme. Crossley. There' is no more persistent advertiser of Australia than. Mme. Crossley, and she herself stands for what is best in our womanhood. In giving the itinerary of her present tour to an English interviewer lately, she combined it with a lesson in Empire geography. She sai dthat among the composers whose works she intended to interpret were Bach, Greig, Elgar, Stanford, Bantock, Vaughan, Williams, Graham, Peel, and Hamilton Harty. In her repertoire are also included Liza Lehmann's "Nonsense Songs," and a series of folk songs from Mr Cecil Sharp's collection. Sir Charles Santley has also written her an "Aye Maria," which she will include in her Australian programmes. ;