Episode 152. Patricia Neway
SOCIAL SHARE
SUBSCRIPTION PLATFORM
Today begins a new summer series on Countermelody, celebrating mid-century music-making in New York City between the years 1950 and 1975. We begin with a celebration of Patricia Neway (1919-2012), one of the towering figures of the operatic – and Broadway – stages. Two of her greatest assumptions, in fact, took place on the Broadway stage: Magda Sorel in Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Consul, which premiered on Broadway in 1950, and the Mother Abbess in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final stage music, The Sound of Music, for which Neway was awarded the 1960 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Neway combined an unusual voice of startling, sometimes raw, power, with an acting ability rarely seen, especially on the operatic stage. Neway’s range easily encompassed contralto roles as well as dramatic soprano parts. This episode features audio excerpts from rare kinescopes of her performances of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites as Menotti’s Maria Golovin, as well as her galvanizing portrayal of Magda Sorel from a 1960 film. She also displays her stunning musical versatility in music by Buxtehude, Barber, Gluck, and the late Carlisle Floyd, as well as settings by Israel Citkowitz, John Gruen, and Thomas de Hartmann of texts by James Joyce from a rare 1959 recording. In addition, I dispel forever the fake news, all pervasive claims to the contrary, that Patricia Neway and someone named Frances Breeze, an exact contemporary of Neway’s, are one and the same person.
RECORDINGS HEARD IN THIS EPISODE
Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II (orchestrated Richard Rodney Bennett): Climb Ev’ry Mountain (The Sound of Music). Patricia Neway, Orchestra conducted by Frederick Dvonch [1959]
Patricia Neway in stills from the 1960 film of The Consul.
Gian Carlo Menotti: Any news for me?… To this we’ve come (The Consul). Patricia Neway, Regina Sarfaty, Ruth Kobart, Arnold Voketaitis, Orchestra conducted by Werner Torkanowsky [1960]
Here is the YouTube link to Neway’s extraordinary 1960 filmed performance of this scene, which is also available on VAI video (click link to order).
Carlisle Floyd: And you, you Banshee! (The Sojourner and Mollie Sinclair). Patricia Neway, Norman Treigle, Julius Rudel, Orchestra of the East Carolina College School of Music [telecast XII.1963] (An audio recording of the complete performance is also available from VAI [click here].)
Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach: Try to Forget (The Cat and the Fiddle). Patricia Neway, Orchestra conducted by Lehman Engel [1953]
Dietrich Buxtehude: Recit. Der Herr lässet sein Heil verkündigen… Arioso. Er gedenkt an seine Gnade (Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BuxWV 98). Patricia Neway, Arnold Black, Allegro Chamber Players [Arnold Black, Donald Homuth, Herman Chessid] [1953]
(Click on the link above to view the kinescope on YouTube)
(Click on the link above to view the kinescope on YouTube)
Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti: The Queen! You have trumped the Queen!… Who is there to love me? (A Hand of Bridge, Op. 35). Patricia Neway, Vladimir Golschmann, Symphony of the Air [1960]
