MUSIC NOTES

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7110, 23 April 1910, Page 8

MUSIC NOTES

It is estimated that two thousand voices were “tried” for the J. C. Williamson grand opera chorus. After the first trial the number was reduced to two hundred, and finally some seventeen were selected.

After three weeks of most gratifying business at the Sydney Royal "Madame Butterfly" gives place this evening to the equally exquisite "La Boheme.” of the same composer. Mdlle. Bel Sorel, whose intensity of acting and highly cultivated voice has fascinated Sydney, will sing Mimi.

Galileo Gasparri, the handsome young Italian tenor of Madame Emma Calve’s Concert Company, is considered to be one of the really groat Italian tenors of the present time. His voice is light and of beautiful liquid quality. His princL pal successes have been, in “La Tosca,” “Boheme,” and “Cavalleria Rusticana.”

Bom and brought up in a family of homely Irish people, that well-known songstress. Miss Amy Castles, who appears hero again nest April, sets great store on the virtue of possessing every domestic attainment. She is herself well acquainted with all the mysteries of cooking, needlework, and house management, and feels nothing but contempt for those ultra-modern young women who disdain the acquisition of such precious accomplishments. In Miss Castles’s opinion, every young girl should be fitted for the responsibilities of marriage by receiving a thorough training in domestic economy, for, as she truly remarks, there is no greater failure in life than a wife ill-equipped for the duties of her important position. Whether Miss Castles will ever test the value of her own early training by entering the bonds of matrimony herself is, of course, open to considerable speculation, but the young lady has shown that she’is not indifferent to the significance of the wedded state by‘declaiming on one occasion that "a husband and some nice children” were not the least of her material ambitions. CALVE' Madame Emma Calve, the brilliant French soprano, has only been a-few days resident in Melbourne, but she has already won scores of admirers by her unaffected demeanour and charming ways (writes a correspondent). Despite her great hon-ours,-she is a woman of a simple and vivacious temperament, and does the most unconventional things in a delightfully impulsive manner. For example, on the day of her arrival in Melbourne she happened*to notice a street hawker with a load of passion fruit, and would not rest content until she had bought from him about half of his stock, which she triumphantly carried in a iuge Lag up to her rooms at her hotel. Subsequently she was making unceremonious visits to the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. where she spent a good of time in examining the trees and other vegetation. Calve, indeed, is a groat nature lover, and is enthusiastically arranging picmcs to various famous resorts within an easy drive of the metropolis. She declares also that she is enamoured fom Australian air and sunlight, which she likens to those of her native Aveyron, in the south of France.