THE Women’s University Glee Club is one of our most enterprising musical institutions, and it has in Gerald Reynolds a conductor who seems to devote most of his summer to excavating novelties for his well-educated charges to sing. The latest program put together by the industrious Reynolds was a Pan-American affair, which ranged from North American Indian explorations to South American discoveries.
All of Mr. Reynolds’ folk-song finds are worth hearing (and any singer who bothers to obtain copies of two Brazilian ditties which were on the program will have on his hands two guaranteed hits), but perhaps more important are the original compositions which Mr. Reynolds collects and presents. By this I do not imply that all of these manuscripts are good, although Mr. Reynolds maintains a much better batting average than most societies for the advancement of the contemporary composer; the importance lies in Mr. Reynolds’ readiness to encourage young musicians by bringing forward their works without homilies or apologies. His chorus sings them, and you may take them or run from the hall. There is a delightful lack of missionary spirit in the presentation.
AMONG the composers whom Mr. Reynolds introduced at the recent exhibition was Robert Russell Bennett, best known to American audiences as the orchestrator of “Show Boat” and many other scores. At present, Mr. Bennett is a Guggenheim Fellow, and is composing his own music instead of lending his enormous technical skill to the arrangement of other people’s. Mr. Reynolds produced “About a Lorelei,” described officially as “Theme and Variations in the Form of a Ballade,” for which Mr. Bennett was his own librettist, and a good one, too. A mezzo and a contralto tell the story. A soprano supplies the voice of the Lorelei, and the chorus and piano “comment on the affair.”
Everything begins pacifically. “Once upon a time there was a Lorelei,” sings the mezzo narrator, after a short introduction. “Half of her was bathing in the cool, clear Rhine—the other half was bathing in the warm sunshine,” adds the chorus, which starts its comments early in the ballade. “The poor thing was really quite bored,” announces the contralto—and then, “a tall New Yorker came sightseeing by the place.”
Mr. Bennett does not weary the auditor with love interest. “What’s the use of talking?” sings the chorus, allegro vivo. “He fell in love and married her.” They went to New York, which was “quite an adventure for a Lorelei.” Now there is a charming episode, in which one learns that “Lorelei was happy on the forty-first floor; bathing in her private pool, seeing clear to Boston from her own back door . . . dreaming she’d only been dreaming before, lazing, luring and lovely!”
“And that,” remarks the mezzo, “should be the end of the story—but it’s not, because along came temptation.” “Oh!” glissandos the chorus. “No!” comes back, in imitation. “It wasn’t what you think! It Wasn’t a man, and it wasn’t a woman, and it wasn’t any other of a thousand little things that hunt New York girls down.” “Don’t tell us what it wasn’t—tell us what it was!” snaps back the chorus, although this rejoinder runs counter to the solo voice and is not intelligible in performance. That, by the way, is Mr. Bennett’s only error. The clash of voices occasionally obscures the sense.
NOW the piano begins to take an interest in the events. A slow, languid fox-trot accompanies the statement that temptation was “a warm, soft, summer-night breeze, creeping through the window, whispering a melody and rum, dum, dum of a jazz band on Broadway and that was all.” Lorelei is haunted by this music.