February 1, 1 923
MUSICAL COURIER
48
Helen Moller Dancers in Recital
Despite the inclement weather there was a large audience on hand at Helen Moller’s Little Theater for the Greek Dance for the recital given on the evening of January 21. The program, as usual, was an interesting one, made up as it was of solo and ensemble numbers of contrasting types. Miss Moller herself takes part in these recitals, and especially to be commended is her interpretative ability in numbers requiring the dis- © uiskin play of deep emotion, such as Chopin’s Funeral March and The Prisoner, danced to the Rachmaninoff prelude in C sharp minor. The Fountain, the music of which was a Chopin etude, as danced by one of Miss Moller’s pupils, was a fascinating number. This young lady’s arms and hands— in fact, her entire body—are very expressive and respond freely to music. Brahms’ Bubble dance was a particularly graceful ensemble number and special mention should be made of the grouping for the Drigo serenade. However, the audience appeared to thoroughly enjoy the entire program.
Meisle Returns from Tour
Kathryn Meisle has returned to New York from a concert tour in the Middle West which included appearances in Chicago, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Williamport and Lancaster, Miss Meisle had been booked for a concert in Manchester N. H, on January 12 with the London String Quartet, but owing to the illness of a member of the latter organization the concert was postponed until February 20. In Detroit the contralto sang with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the next day she journeyed to Ann Arbor with the
HER NATIVE AMERICA STRONGLY APPEALS TO
MME. CAHIER AFTER EIGHTEEN YEARS’ ABSENCE
orchestra to repeat the program in the orchestral course of . the University School of Music there. The Ann Arbor appearance was a reëngagement, the result of her success at the children’s, concert at their annual Music Festival last May. From Ann Arbor the contralto went to Williamport, where she gave a recital with Erl Beatty, the Philadelphia accompanist, at the piano. In Lancaster she was the soloist with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra—this was also in the nature of a reëngagement, as her success with this orchestra at the Youngstown Festival last May was responsible for the Lancaster engagement.
Easton Engaged for Another Spring Festival
Florence Easton, who leaves the Metropolitan the middle of February for an extensive concert tour of the Pacific Coast, will appear in May at the important Hays, (Kan.) Music Festival. This season at the opera she has scored heavily with the public in three new leading parts— the title role in Carmen, Princess von Werdenberg in
MME. CHARLES CAHIER
Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. and Cio-Cio-San in Madame Butterfly, besides singing many of her old parts that are favorites with the public.
Music Students at Schelling Concerts
Music students are flocking to the afternoons of piano concertos which Ernest Schelling is giving on successive Tuesday afternoons at Town Hall, with the assistance of the New York Symphony. The final concert on February 6 will be devoted to four masterpieces of the piano literature, including the Chopin E minor, the Mozart A major, the Liszt A major and the Paderewski Polish Fantasy.
Stokowski on Way Home
Paris, January 24 (By Cable).—Leopold Stokowski, before leaving Paris today to sail home on the Mauretania, expressed tremendous enthusiasm over the sonority and beautiful singing tone of the Saint Cecilia Orchestra, which he had just directed in two concerts at the Augusteo, R°me•	(Signed) Loomis Taylor.
Although She Returned from Three Short Visits Prior to This, Her Present Stay Will Be of Considerable Duration and Perhaps Permanent—Celebrated in All Parts of Europe and Decorated by Many Presidents, Kings and Emperors, She Has Enjoyed a Most Unusual Career—Will Give Her First New York Recital
at Town Hall on February 5
Mme. Charles Cahier, the singer, who for the first time in eighteen years is really spending a whole season in her native land, started out by being born in Indianapolis. Her name was Sarah Jane Layton-Walker. Against all the best Indianapolis tradition, she decided to sing instead of becoming an author; and neither she nor the world has had cause to regret that she was not as most other Indianapolisans are.
Her own country is just having the opportunity to begin to know her. She has paid us three visits previous to the present one, but short ones. She made a few appearances at the Metropolitan as “guest” on these occasions and last year came over specially to create in this country the alto solo part in Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, which she sang at the original performance of the work in Munich, shortly after Mahler’s death, and has sung so many times since that she could sing it backward without effort.
It was, in fact, in close artistic association with the late Gustave Mahler that she became known in Europe. For four and a half years she sang the first contralto and mezzo-soprano roles in the Vienna Opera—which was the best on the Continent in those days—when Mahler was director of that institution. She has sung almost everywhere there is to sing in Europe, in all the foremost opera houses, although it is Austria, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries that know her best.
But at that she has kept her American way of doing and thinking things. Three minutes of talk, and no one could mistake her for anything but an American, notwithstanding her foreign sounding name and her almost twenty years of life in Europe. She pervaded the pleasant furnished apartment which she now has in New York as thoroughly as^ she used to the delightful villa up in the hilly part of Vienna, near the Turkenschanz park, just around the corner from Theodor Leschetizky’s house, where she lived when I first met her.
Interviewing her was really hard work, first because everything that was mentioned led to one personal reminiscence on the part of either Mme. Cahier of M. Cahier or myself, something from the pre-war European days that interested us but was not for Musical Courier pages; and, second, because I was pretty familiar with her career already, so that questioning the distinguished singer was more like a confirmatory examination than an interview.
“Have you given up operatic work?”
“Of course not, although of late years I have done mostly concert singing.”
“How many operas do you know?”
“Twenty-six, in French, Italian and German.”
“Are those all the languages?”
“All for opera. I have used eight other languages in song programs.”
“What—only eleven altogether? Why so modest?”
“Well, in decorations I made it an even dozen. Of course the king business is not as good as it used to be, but before things changed I had been decorated by the Emperors of Germany and Austria, the Presidents of France and Finland, the Kings of Sweden, Denmark, Wuerttemburg, Bavaria and Bulgaria, and the Grand-Dukes of Hessen-Darmstadt, Lippe-Detmold, Oldenburg and Baden.”
Not one of the great European festivals of the last dozen years and more has failed to include her in its list of soloists. She was a star at the Vienna Haydn celebration, the Heidelberg Liszt Festival, the great Brahms festival at Vienna, the Beethoven celebration at Bonn, Mengelberg’s great Mahler festival at Amsterdam, and the festivals at Hamburg, Munich, Stockholm, Berlin, and other cities. In opera she was a regular guest at the Wagner and Mozart festivals in Munich for many seasons.
She has become known as a specialist in certain things. The solo part in the Mahler Lied von der Erde, already mentioned, she has sung no less than sixty-seven times in a dozen years; and that she is as popular as ever in Europe is shown by the fact that she sang no less than 162 times in the year 1922. She has never taught, except to coach an occasional promising young artist, but she has declined offers of master classes in the Academies of Vienna and Berlin.
Famous composers and artists she has known by the hundreds. Grieg, Mahler, Saint-Saëns, Nikisch, Capoul, Co-quelin aine, have all praised her art. Jean de Reszke, with whom she studied, predicted the splendid career which she has had. A signal success for her since she came here this season was the performance of Ernest Bloch’s Twenty-
second Psalm at Cleveland. “I cannot dream of a better interpreter,” said the composer.
And on the afternoon of February S, at the Town Hall, she is to give her first New York recital. A glance at the program shows the standard of her art. The first group lists Marcello, Scarlatti and Beethoven; the second is devoted to Schubert; then come some things still unknown here, a song of Schrecker, one by Arthur Perleberg, and two by Alfons Bluemel, set to poems in old German by the seventeenth century poet, Arno Holz; and, to end with, there are songs of Ravel, Debussy,
Henry Hadley, Werner Josten, and Charles Griffes. It took Mme. Cahier a long time to get back to Indianapolis and the surrounding towns between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; but now she has got there, it will be a surprise if she is ever allowed to go back to Europe again permanently, taking her splendid art with her.	H. O. O.
Huhn Conducts Orpheus Club in Concert
A varied and interesting program was presented by the. Orpheus Club of Ridgewood, N. J., Bruno Huhn conducting, on Monday evening, January IS, at the high school chapel. Jeanne Laval, contralto, and Helen Jeffrey, violinist, were the assisting artists. Charles M. Hobbs, Jr., was the club’s accompanist and Miss Laval had the support of Marion Sims at the piano. Mr. Huhn obtained some excellent effects from the chorus, which evidenced careful and intelligent training. A large audience thoroughly enjoyed the concert.
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