Regine Crespin

Regine Crespin has an amazing voice. She recently pleased New York critics as the Marschallin in the Lotte Lehmann-directed Rosenkavalier at the Met, but New York has not yet heard anything like her "Divinites du Styx," which nearly knocked me out of my seat Thursday night.

Her soprano is absolutely enormous, solid and brilliant throughout its considerable range, but especially stunning at the top. Mme. Crespin launched into the treacherous Gluck aria with no more visible effort than if she had been singing a Faure chanson. She did, in fact, sing some Faure later in the program, and very nicely, too, but my grosser sensibilities craved another of those absurd and wonderful scenas for dramatic soprano something like "Ozean, du Ungeheuer" from Weber's Oberon.

The transition from opera to art song within a recital is always hazardous, and Mme, Crespin had a bit of trouble adjusting her voice to the intimate demands of a group of Schubert and Schumann lie.ler. Schumann's Mondnacht, for example, was "crooned" rather than sung, and in general one missed just that quality which Mme. Crespin's recent teacher, Lotte Lehmann, would have brought to the songs, a sense that one was hearing a singing actress rather than a merely vocal phenomenon of the order of the Colossus of Rhodes.

After the intermission, however, Mme. Crespin seemed much more in the recital vein, and in a Faure and Debussy group she made her musical and dramatic points less through sheer impressiveness of voice than by a happy talent for shading and nuance. An eloquent performance of three of Wagner's Wesendonkleder explained in part Mme. Crespin's great success at Bayreuth; opera audiences must have responded as well to the unmistakable aura of the Grand Manner which hovers about her. In this age of slenderized divas, Mme. Crespin remains a satisfyingly ample woman, and on Thursday night she managed with absolutely devastating aplomb the enormous piece of green satin which for some reason was draped about her shoulders. Equally devastating was the brilliant high B (at the end of Gounod's "O my lyre immortelle") which brought the scheduled part of the concert to a close with the expected volley of applause. Then, as if just to show us she could do it. Mme. Crespin sang as an encore a Poulenc trifle which was all wit and elegance. Now if she only had followed that with "Ozean, du Ungeheuer"

[Ed. Note--In the third paragraph of the reply to Mr. Kllson's letter see page 40 the last phrase of the third sentence should read "complete change of the social order" rather than "violent change..."]