The Week in Review

TV seems to be demonstrating that music should be heard and not seen. In emphasizing video at the expense of audio on musical shows, TVmen often sacrifice good sound, and sometimes good music, without managing to get good TV. The televiewer who closes his eyes and listens can hear how crude, sloppy and badly balanced most TV music is. Opening his eyes and looking, he can see how overbaked or tasteless the images that go with music can be. Last week's musical shows ranged from a brand-new opera to the singing of vintage popular songs. Most were calculated to make a music lover run to his radio or record player.

A Devil Raises Hell. The opera, Lucas Foss's Griffelkin, with libretto by Alistair Reid, was offered by the NBC Opera Theater (Sun. 4 p.m.). Griffelkin is a little devil whose tenth-birthday gift is to be sent up to earth to raise a little hell. When he does a good deed, he is banished forever to earth, where he happily becomes, minus tail and horns, a normal small boy. What with a singing letter-box and dancing lions, Griffelkin was in the old operatic tradition. But the music did not sound much more inspired than the book. Most of the time the orchestra played far below the singers, as if it were off in another studio (it was), and in one dramatic crowd scene, where orchestra and singers are supposed to rise to a crashing climax, the climax faded out, as if the sound had got to be too much for the engineers, and they had put their hands to the controls (they did).

One of the most popular musical shows on TV, and the oldest, is NBC's Your Hit Parade (Sat. 10:30 p.m.), which offers musical dramatizations of the top seven tunes of the week, aided by the vocal efforts of Dorothy Collins, Gisele Mackenzie, Snooky Lanson and Russell Arms, and abetted by the orchestral ministrations of Raymond Scott. However many weeks a tune may hit Your Hit Parade, a different dramatization honors it each time. The dramatizations also have a way of transporting viewers and listeners far off in space and time, and even in spirit.

A Song Before Supper. Last week The Yellow Rose of Texas was on a gaslit stage back in Civil War days, with drummer girls marching to its stirring beat. Love Is a Many Splendored Thing took place in a many-splendored pastoral scene (with a dismounted Gisele Mackenzie in riding clothes). Love and Marriage was in an abstract setting of sky and bliss, concluding with a wedding procession. The Shifting, Whispering Sands had Snooky Lanson looking like an obbligato against a film showing "the beauty and terror of the desert." Moments to Remember (a comedy number) went to Africa, where a couple of big-game hunters were popped into stew pots by cannibals, and were seen singing before they became supper (Tarzan finally swung in on a vine and rescued the lady). A Romantic Guy, I became a top-hat-and-white-tie serenade, and Suddenly There Is a Valley went to a hospital, where a nurse (Dorothy Collins) sang her "song of optimism and faith" to a suffering patient. Autumn Leaves had a jazzy Red Riding Hood ruffle a slick "wolf" in a wooden glen.

The Voice of Firestone (Mon. 8:30 p.m., ABC) has a steady popularity as a family show because it offers light, semi-classic music that is sweet and sentimental. Its audio is not helped by a video that has a male model just sitting around while a soprano (Elaine Malbin) rather absentmindedly strokes his cheek and reaches, not always successfully, for high notes.

The vintage popular tunes (Gus Kahn hits of yesteryear) were sung by Tony Martin on NBC's show of the same name (Mon. 7:30 p.m.). This show, like Eddie Fisher's (Wed. 7:30 p.m., NBC) and Dinah Shore's (Tues., Thurs. 7:30 p.m., NBC), is dominated by a handsome singer who manages to put the imprint of his own personality on the songs he sings. Nonetheless, it is sometimes disturbing to watch the curious expressions on the faces of even these popular singers as they grope for the right note and also try to arrange their features to" fit the varying emotions of a foolish lyric.

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