Music: Florentine Choir

From Florence, Italy, last week press-agented with folio upon folio on the City of Flowers, on its musical heritage stretched to include Dante, Michelangelo & Amerigo Vespucci, came the Florentine Polyphonic Choir, gave its debut concert* in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.

Trumpeters blew welcome from the stage, a standard bearer struck the first note of color and 50 singers in Renaissance dress, filed on. Conductor Sandro Benelli (brother of Poet Sem Benelli, author of The Jest) put them through their paces, helped them find pianissimos ineffably tender, failed to tie up smoothly whole sheafs of measures.

Critics compared them to U.S. choruses of the first rank, voted the visitors the advantage in costume and tradition, gave musical preference to the U. S. choruses.

*The Florentine Choir will give 60 concerts in the U. S. & Canada. The tour goes through New Jersey. Pittsburgh, the Middle West, up into Wisconsin, Minnesota, on to the Pacific Coast, back through the South, up into Canada by way of Michigan.