MUSIC NOTES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1378, 21 September 1916, Page 34

MUSIC NOTES.

(By

“‘G’ String.”)

Mr. Paul Dufault, the favourite French-Canadian tenor, will close his Australasian tour at the end of October. A lengthy tour of Canada and the United States of America has been booked for Mr. Dufault, and he sails from Sydney early in November to fulfil his engagements.

Mr. Walter Helsdon, who acted as treasurer for the Tivoli Follies, will manage the tour of the Tivoli Concert Party. Miss Pauline Bindley, the talented young Austral.an soprano, who is a member of the Paul Dufault concert party, is planning an early visit to America, where she hopes to find a place in one of the grand opera companies. A writer in a recent issue of the London “Daily Telegraph” thinks it is sheer laziness that makes concert singers enunciate so indistinctly. He is convinced that “if their bread and butter depended upon their pronouncing their words clearly, they would very soon learn to do so. Their brethren of the music halls, out of whose books they might well take a few leaves, never seem to complain of the difficulties of the English language, for the simple reason that they know perfectly well that, if they were indistinct the gallery would emphatically express its disapproval with cat-calls, hoots, and the whistles that are known in music hall parlance as ‘the bird.’ It is a pity that the same freedom of utterance is not permitted to concert audiences. The method might seem somewhat drastic, but it would work a wonderful change for the better. A music hall comedian once informed me that for a certain indistinctness of utterance at one of his earlier appearances he was rewarded with ‘a bird large enough to take on tour,’ and he never io.got the lesson. He is earning £2OO a week now. A singer has only to listen to Mr. Harry Lauder in one of his Scottish ditties, or to Mr. George Robey, warbling a love song—to whom he may take off his hat as great artists — to realise that there are no diificui ties in the English language that cannot be surmounted. And, to go still further, theie is nothing wnatever in the art of singing that intelligent singers cannot master if they only take the pains to do so.”