New Records

Between 1938 and 1943 the ears of U.S. music lovers bent to one of the most unusual singers they had ever heard. Her name was Elsie Houston; she was born in Brazil; she was the great-great-great-granddaughter of the grandfather of Texas' Sam Houston, and she could trumpet like a fishwife or trill like a bird. On the concert stage (once 22,000 people gathered at Washington's Water Gate to hear her), she divided her program between art songs and Brazilian folk songs. In nightclubs she liked to dim the lights to a pair of candles, pick up a finger drum, and let her voice go up in smoke for a savage voodoo number or wail some agonizing quarter tones in an ox driver's lament.

Then she would startle her listeners by a playful ditty sung with a lilting girlish quality.

At the summit of success, Elsie Houston found the world too burdensome, and one night in 1943 she ended her life with an overdose of sleeping tablets. But luckily some of her finest performances were captured on records and ten of them have been reissued on an LP as Elsie Houston Sings Brazilian Songs (Victor). Even her ghost makes other folk singers seem pale.

Other new records: Debussy: Preludes, Books I & 2 (Reine Gianoli pianist; Westminster, 2 LPs). A two-part testament from a composer who seduced new sounds out of the piano, and changed the world's attitude toward it. These 24 masterpieces include such atmospheric standbys as the Sunken Cathedral and Girl with the Flaxen Hair as well as evocations of more earthly items, a city of ancient Egypt, a Greek column, a picture on a postcard. Pianist Gianoli plays them with tenderness and, when it is called for, fiery gusto.

Poulenc: Les Mamelles de Tiresias (Denise Duval, Jean Giraudeau; Opera-Comique Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Andre Clutyens; Angel). In this all but untranslatable farce (composed to the poem by Guillaume Apollinaire), a young wife divests herself of the charms of her sex and "becomes" a man, while her husband sets about creating children artificially, with surrealistically tragic results.

In the end both resume their normal relationship, and the curtain falls on a moral: "Dear audience, go make children." It is all done up in Poulenc's sauciest style, with impudent moments of Pucciniesque sugar and Wagnerian bombast, but for real fun must be followed with the libretto. Soprano Duval tops a fine cast.

Prokofiev: Cello Sonata, Op. 119 (Edmund Kurtz and Artur Balsam; Columbia). A 1949 product of Russia's late top-notch composer, this work is unrestrainedly, even sentimentally, melodious, with little of Prokofiev's characteristic persimmony tang. Russian-born Cellist Kurtz gives it a singing performance.

Ravel: Songs (Gerard Souzay, baritone; Paris Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Edouard Lindenberg; London).

Three of the most elegantly contrived songs of the century, sung with utmost appeal by a man who seems to understand every nuance.

Rossini: William Tell Overture (NBC Symphony conducted by Arturo Toscanini; Victor). No man alive, not even the Lone Ranger, can put the spur to an old war horse as the Maestro does to this one. It should not be missed.

Strauss: Elektra Highlights (Christel Goltz, Elisabeth Hoengen, Ferdinand Frantz; Bavarian State Orchestra conducted by Georg Sold; Decca). Three excerpts from the crudest, most tormented and greatest of Richard Strauss operas (1909). Highest light: the harrowing, and then melting, scene in which Orestes returns from his exile to find his sister ruined by her enslavement. A fine, though disappointingly incomplete, recording.

Virgil Thomson: Four Saints in Three Acts (Soloists, chorus and orchestra conducted by the composer; Victor). "Nobody visits more than they do visits them," chants the cast in a typical line from this famed opera, and so it goes.

Thomson took as much pleasure in clouding the atmosphere--and still making it appear clear--as his librettist, Gertrude Stein. The result: fun for a while.

Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (Phyllis Curtin and the New Orchestral Society of Boston conducted by Aillis Page; Cook). Rising young Soprano Curtin and eight buzzing cellos give this tropical favorite the sheen of perfection and the recording fidelity is the highest.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.