Word: contraltos
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Virginia Lewis' start was much like another Philadelphia Negro's, Contralto Marian Anderson. Soprano Lewis, discovered six years ago by Contralto Anderson's accompanist, studied as best she could, earned her living as a housemaid, went on relief, finally got a WPA music-teaching job last February. One day her voice was exhibited to Samuel Rosenbaum, president of the Robin Hood Dell concerts. Mr. Rosenbaum, after launching Soprano Lewis in the Dell, vowed to get her what he called "visibility" at the White House. He got it through Pennsylvania's Senator Guffey's sister Emma...
...noodled through a routine Walküre, a passable Madame Butterfly. Then it presented Samson and Delilah, with its first U. S.GALLERY-GOERS AT THE MET Also present: orchids and diamonds, born temptress in 22 years: slim, dark Risë (rhymes with Pisa) Stevens, 27, of The Bronx. Contralto Stevens proved a notable addition to the Met's strippers (who had heretofore included Sopranos Helen Jepson and Lily Pons) and in the seduction scene gave Samson (barrel-shaped Tenor René Maison) quite a going-over. But critics doubted that the Stevens pleasing midriff and voice were enough...
...symphony orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago), she made a triumphant concert return to Hampton Institute, in whose choir her voice began. This season Dorothy Maynor has engagements in 27 States, is making two big cross-country tours. Boxofficially she is not yet the peer of big-voiced Contralto Marian Anderson, who sells out Carnegie Hall. But Dorothy Maynor is just hitting her stride...
Most ambitious work of the evening was a "ballad poem" for narrator, contralto, white and Negro choirs and orchestra: And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Poet Katherine Garrison Chapin (Mrs. Francis Biddle, wife of the U. S. Solicitor General) wrote the words; the music was by shy, devout Negro William Grant Still, who inscribed his score: "Humble thanks to God, the source of inspiration." Composer Still's inspiration often ran to obvious, ear-catching effects, but it kept pace with Mrs. Biddle's ballad: an evocation of Negroes gathering in a pine clearing after the white folks...
Savagely, in a can-opener contralto, Mile. Oswald ripped into La Dame de Monte Carlo, Poet Jean Cocteau's half song, half chant of the tables, the croupiers and "always the Mediterranean waiting." The mobile was removed, its discs and wires jittering gently. Mile...