MUSIC
Gm:kr-CARLO MENorn, the author of two short operas now running at the Aldwych Theatre, is an American Italian, and so is the musical idiom which he uses. The Telephone is no more than a sketch, with a cast of two—or three, if you count the telephone which plays a large part and gives the piece its sub-title of L'Amour a Trois. A young man trying to propose to a girl is interrupted whenever he is getting to the point by the telephone ringing and the subsequent interminable conversation. Finally he goes out, rings up himself and proposes that way ; and is of course accepted. The whole interest of the sketch lies in Lucy's one-sided conversation into the receiver, verbally adroit and wedded to a witty and original music. An original hybrid, that is to say, a modernised version (not a pastiche) of Rossini and the older Italian vocal style, with some- thing of the deliberate inconsequence and the extra sec quality of Poulenc and the French composers of the i92os, but without their deliberate and rather brittle parody. An orchestra of only fourteen (including two pianos) and Menotti's unpretentious music, with its unfailingly cantabile quality, kept the whole performance on the right intimate scale.
The second opera, The Medium, was much more ambitious dramatically. What started in the first act as a potential tragedy tailed off into melodrama. The music, which showed real emotional power in Monica's ballad to Toby in Act r, descended to mere background in the climax of Act 2. Marie Powers's acting, as Madame Flora, however, certainly gave the scene its full dramatic quality. The whole performance was on a high level musically, Evelyn Keller singing Monica (Madame Flora's daughter) with beautiful pathos and the séance dupes all making the most of their small roles. The whole production was in many ways an object lesson to opera-producers in this country, not only in the quality of the singing but in the simplicity and naturalness of the production and the sense of musical style. Menotti's music—which owed much more to the Puccini of II Tabarro in The Medium—is not great music, but it is dramatic to the bone, natural and singable, with that unmistakable well- tailored air that is specifically American and such a pleasant surprise
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