Specialist

When Eva Gauthier announces a song-recital she does not need to label her songs with the conventional "first time anywhere" in order to attract the musically alert. Fifteen years ago Eva Gauthier established a reputation as a sensitive purveyor of interesting, untried songs. At her debut in 1917 she sang the first Stravinsky songs ever sung in the U. S. In 1924 when skirts were at knee-length, she caused more talk by appearing in a subdued, trailing gown and singing the songs of an upstart named George Gershwin. More pigeon-plump now than when John Singer Sargent sketched her, she is back again giving U. S. concerts. Already she has sung in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Scranton. Last week, for the first time in five years, she gave a Manhattan recital.

Opera, the goal of nearly every young soprano, struck Eva Gauthier early as being too limited, too inflexible a goal for her. She was the daughter of an explorer and astronomer, French Canadian Louis Gauthier. Her uncle was Sir Wilfred Laurier, Canada's first French-Canadian Premier.

Sir Wilfred helped finance Eva Gauthier's musical education. She went to Europe. Intelligence and imagination helped her make much of a voice neither opulent nor particularly wide of range. She married a Dutchman (since divorced), went to Java to live. In Java she acquired her liking for Batik gowns and heavy oriental jewelry which seemed to go with her shiny black hair, her curious, slow-spreading smile. When she arrived in the U. S., she had added Javanese folk music to her repertoire.

Songs from Java, jazz songs, songs so old that no one else thought of singing them, songs so new that no one else quite dared to put them on a formal program --in all Eva Gauthier has introduced more than 700 songs. Last week's program was typically distinctive. Jean-Baptiste Lully, court musician to Louis XIV, was a classical beginning far off the beaten track. Then there was Gabriel Faure, the French man who transmitted his fragile, elusive style to the more popular Maurice Ravel. Every song had its mood subtly, surely conveyed. Toward the end a ghoulish piece by Modernist Alban Berg (Wozzeck) was done so effectively that a sudden wail which came from the audience struck people at first as an overtone which be longed there. But it was a listener taken with a fit of epilepsy.

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