ANNE THURSFIELD (Mezzo-Soprano)
ROBERT MURCHIE (Flute)
FREDERICK THURSTON (Clarinet)
AUBREY BRAIN (Horn)
SIDONIE GOOSSENS (Harp)
THE INTERNATIONAL STRING QUARTET:
ANDRE MANGEOT (Violin); WALTER PRICE (Violin); Eric Bray (Viola); JACK SHINEBOURNE
(Violoncello) Donna lombarda; La prigioniera ; La pesca dell'anello ,
ANNE THURSFIELD is a singer almost by inheritance, and a musician, apart from her natural instincts, by the happiest of circumstances. Both her mother and grandmother were singers of distinction, and her own life has been passed in the company of musicians and the environment of music. She studied in Brussels, Lausanne, Berlin, and London, and to that she owes some part of her great linguistic gifts, for she can sing songs in any one of six languages. She was to have given her first recital in London, but the declaration of War in 1914 put an end to that, and for the next four years she devoted herself to relief work.
Anne Thursfield is a lieder-singer, and opera has had no place in her career. But in her own field of lieder, which is one of the most difficult of all in which to make a success, she is recognized in more than one European country as a singer of more than ordinary attainments.
LDEBRANDO PIZETTI is known in this country only by two or three instrumental sonatas and a few songs, but that is by no means tho measure of his worth. In Italy he is esteemed as perhaps the most significant composer of these days. His opera, Debora e Jaele, which has been performed in most European countries and in America, is not only a beautiful work, but it shows Pizetti to be a reformer and possibly a prophet with some remarkable ideas of what the future of opera maybe. Yet. in substituting a modern form of dramatic recitative for the former lyricism of Italian opera, he has, in the opinion of those who admire his work, happily succeeded in achieving merely another type of lyrical melodic beauty. Melody, it would fortunately appear, has more lives even than a cat.
VITTORIO RIETI, who is only twenty-four, is rapidly making a name for himself as one of the most promising of the younger Italian composers. His work is engaging and very modern, as, indeed, it need be, for, at a certain point in his career, Rieti destroyed all the work he had written up to then and began again with a clean sheet. (First Performance)