Music: Voice like a Cello

Once a year the Friends of the Boston Symphony—some 1,000 Back Bay Brahmins who pay the Symphony’s deficits—get a concert free. To make things intimate, Boston’s vast Symphony Hall is curtained off halfway back. Last week, at the annual club concert, Conductor Serge Koussevitzky led the orchestra through a typical free-treat program—a bit of Mozart, a bit of Berlioz. Then he shooed the orchestra off stage, began a short speech in Russian-coated English: “Our Boston Symphony discovered Dorothy Maynor. Today we discover another great singer—Carol Brice. I hope very soon this artist will also be as great as Dorothy Maynor.”

Then he led on stage 27-year-old Negro Contralto Carol Brice, a tall girl dressed in a simple black dress. She waited quietly while Koussevitzky scampered out front to listen. Then she sang Handel’s My Father and Where Shall I Fly?; two lieder and a rhythmic Hall Johnson spiritual. Her singing brought the house down. After the concert, Koussevitzky led her to the foyer, where the ladies of the audience were drinking tea, nibbling tiny sandwiches and acclaiming her. Said Koussevitzky, who used to be a cellist: “Always I try to make the cello play like the human voice and now . . . her voice is like a cello. . . . Such musicality! Such diction! Never have I heard something like this. [Also], she is beautifully constructed!”

Koussevitzky’s current ambition: to commission a symphony with a contralto obbligato part for her, so that she can tour with the orchestra.

Outside of Boston, Carol Brice was not entirely unknown. The daughter of a North Carolina preacher, she first sang in Manhattan’s Town Hall at 15, with a group of spiritual shouters. At the World’s Fair, she was in the chorus of the all-Negro Hot Mikado. Says she: “They tried to make a Mae West out of me.” Instead she enrolled at the long-haired Juilliard School of Music. Later she married Neil Scott, one of the “screamers” in Hot Mikado.

While at Juilliard, she won the 1944 Naumburg Foundation competition, was given a free Town Hall debut last March. Conductor Fritz Reiner heard her later, in a private recital, got her to record De Falla’s El Amor Brujo and Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song, Eines Fahrenden Gesellen. It was actually Reiner who gave Carol her start, but Serge Koussevitzky’s enthusiastic ‘ helping hand last week assured her future.

In the tiny Harlem apartment where Carol lives with her husband and their 21-month-old son, Carol memorizes her songs by propping scores over the sink or the ironing board. Says she: “People tell me, ‘Oh well, you’re Negro so you’re musical.’ But I have to work just as hard as any white singer to get it out.”