Versatile Jennie

She was small (5 ft. 1 in.), but as she came onstage last week in Spokane, her silver-spangled white satin dress and three-inch heels somehow managed to make her look commanding.

For two hours, she put her Spokane audience through a program that jumped from Handel to Reynaldo Hahn. At the end of an earnest evening, Jennie Tourel finally let the lowbrows in the audience have Songs My Mother Taught Me, My Hero (from The Chocolate Soldier), and a piece of heavy whimsy by Leonard Bernstein, called I Hate Music. Two nights later she sang in the little college town of Pullman, Wash., and half the town turned out to hear her.

One of the four top recitalists singing in the U.S. today, Jennie Tourel is the youngest, the least known and perhaps the most versatile.* Lotte Lehmann, still a great trouper at 58, sings German lieder; England's tiny Maggie Teyte, no longer up to her old grand opera roles, has made a new hit singing delicate French songs. The great contralto Marian Anderson balances Schubert and Brahms with Negro spirituals. But Jennie Tourel sings exhaustive programs in seven languages (English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), and three vocal ranges (soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto). Says she: "[The audiences] understand that it's not everyday's bread what I do."

Now 37, Jennie Tourel is the daughter of a traveling Russian businessman and "was born in Montreal by accident." She lived most of her life in Paris. At first, studying singing, she couldn't agree with a voice teacher who "put me in the mouth some kind of apparatus to teach me voice production." Then she found a coach who told her to sing as if she were reciting a poem, and that solved phrasing for her.

All of a Sudden. In 1933 she was hired by the Paris Opera-Comique, sang more than 250 Carmens and Mignons in seven years. When the Nazis took Paris, she fled to the U.S. For nearly two years New York considered her just another refugee. Then Toscanini signed her to sing Juliette in Berlioz's dramatic symphony Romeo et Juliette, and Stokowski chose her to sing the mezzo-soprano solo in the U.S. premiere of Prokofiev's cantata, Alexander Nevsky. Says Jennie: "All of a sudden everything came to me." After her Town Hall debut in 1943, the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson wrote: "Miss Tourel's conquest . . . was . . . without any local parallel since Kirsten Flagstad's debut at the Metropolitan Opera House some nine seasons ago."

Jennie Tourel's phenomenal range, from low G to high C, is three notes wider than the average mezzo-soprano's. Says Jennie of herself: "The voice can be like a violin, it can be like a viola, it can be like a cello."

She sings highbrow and unhackneyed programs of almost equal density in Winnipeg, Saginaw and Manhattan, and finds that audiences like them equally well in all three places. Says she: "I thought Kalamazoo was a joke. Then all of a sudden, I get an engagement for Kalamazoo. I don't go down to them. I give them everything I have in myself. In Kalamazoo is a wonderful audience."

*Metropolitan Opera stars like Helen Traubel and Lily Pons, who make short concert tours between operatic appearances, are considered prima donnas rather than recitalists.

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