CDs of off-key singers are at times hilarious, horrifying
For decades, the recordings of the socialite soprano Florence Foster Jenkins have stood as a powerful example of the vanity of human wishes.
Madame Jenkins fancied she could sing, and arranged annual charity benefits at which she would present celebrated operatic arias in costume. She had a feeling for how the music could go, the raddled remnants of a voice, and a fallible sense of pitch. Her recordings are notorious, particularly a version of the Queen of the Night's second aria from Mozart's ''The Magic Flute"; it inspires hilarity, pity, and terror, in about equal measure.
Naxos has recently reissued the Jenkins discs on a CD called ''Murder on the High C's," along with other vintage recordings, some of them meant to be amusing (the great Russian bass Alexander Kipnis singing a Handelian version of ''Little Jack Horner" or Wagnerian diva Helen Traubel in duet with gravel-voiced showman Jimmy Durante) and some of them not (the Italian bass Ezio Pinza singing ''The Little Old State of Texas" with the Sons of the Pioneers).
Maybe most people who can't sing like to dream that they can, and the phenomenon isn't restricted to opera and concert music. A few years ago there was a series of CDs called ''Golden Throats" that featured people who couldn't sing (William Shatner as a prime example in ''Mr. Tambourine Man") or people who could, caught way outside their natural element (Bing Crosby in ''Hey, Jude," Mae West in ''Twist and Shout").
Now comes ''The Muse Surmounted," an intermittently entertaining disc on the Homophone label featuring a hitherto unreleased recording by Madame Jenkins, plus recordings by 11 of her rivals in the art of vocal self-delusion.
Nearly all of the singing on this record is awful, and some of it is funny. A soprano named Betty-Jo Schramm offers a florid baroque aria by Graun, with hilarious out-of-style cadenzas and a habit of singing just a hair out of tune; she can almost sing. Mari Lyn, a star of public access TV in New York in the 1980s, introduces a Rossini aria ''in all of its former, ornamented, over-cadenzorized glory"; it is accurate to say that she executes the aria. Natalia De Andrade attacks the heroine's entrance aria from Massenet's ''Manon" with a vengeance; she sounds like Lady Macbeth.
Almost good can be more amusing than truly terrible. Norma-Jean Erdmann-Chadourne, a Boston singer of repute in the 1930s, presents the final scene from ''Aida" with the remnants of voice and style, opposite her completely ungifted husband, both singing in an English translation that would provoke mirth if it had been well sung. The artistic impulses of Alice Gerstl Dushak, one of the early teachers of Jessye Norman, remained vital in her 83d year, although her voice was by then a wreck.
Many of the rest are so hopeless that you feel sorry for them rather than want to laugh. One, the imposingly named Tryphosa Bates-Batcheller, also had Boston connections; her ancestors included one of the founders of the Boston Public Library. The worst, by far, is another socialite soprano, Sari Bunchuk Wontner, who used to stage full productions of ''La Traviata" starring herself, in the vast music room of her Las Vegas mansion.
The hands of Glass
Philip Glass's chamber-opera ''Galileo Galilei" is one of his more effective pieces. This is not necessarily because it is musically superior to his other works, but because the subject is compelling, and Glass was assisted in the libretto by two theatrically savvy friends, Mary Zimmerman and Arnold Weinstein. The story of the great scientist and his battles with the church unfolds backward, and it is told both in operatic terms and through extended dance scenes.
''Galileo Galilei" was one of the works performed in small Studio 210 in the Boston University Theatre during the 2004 Fringe Festival of the College of Fine Arts.
On Saturday afternoon, tenor Steve Sanders was eloquent as the Older Galileo, and Jessica Tarnish demonstrated that she has been gifted with the raw materials of a significant soprano voice. The others brought various degrees of experience and talent to their roles, but stage director James Marvel molded them into an exciting theatrical ensemble, and the work of choreographer Judith Chaffee and her dancers was enthralling. William Lumpkin conducted an excellent and necessarily indefatigable 11-piece orchestra.
An organ's prelude
The annual Open House at Symphony Hall last Saturday afternoon focused on celebrating the restoration of the great Aeolian-Skinner organ. The dedication ceremony included remarks by managing director Mark Volpe and board chairman Peter A. Brooke that included tributes to the firm that carried out the restoration, Foley-Baker Inc., and to the principal donors that made the restoration possible, Eleanor Lewis Campbell and Margaret Andersen Congleton, who were in the audience.
A young organist of staggering virtuoso gifts, Felix Hell, put the instrument through its paces in a recital that ended with Liszt's majestic ''Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H." Hell's playing of this great work was magnificent in the breadth of its conception and the finesse of its detail -- not to mention the thunderingly majestic climaxes summoned by flying fingers and feet. Jeff Weiler called on other, quieter characteristics of the instrument in a deft, waltzy accompaniment he has composed for Buster Keaton's silent comedy short, ''The Frozen North."
About 6,000 people thronged through the hall through the day.
Pro Arte's new chief
The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston has named Kathleen Kearns its new executive director. Kearns, who reports to work Monday, succeeds Scott Schillin, who left at the end of last season. Kearns is a professional flutist who has served as executive of the Nashua (New Hampshire) Symphony, among other management posts. She has also written extensively on music and taught English and music in junior high, high school, and college.
