Song Plugger

The song recital was like a new Schiaparelli showing. The people who filled Manhattan's Carnegie Chamber Hall were largely buyers of music: singers, teachers and publishers. On stage, like a mannequin modeling a new plunging neckline, brown-haired, willowy Janet Fairbank paraded the latest creations in art songs. Tucked away in the corners of the auditorium were young composers, some of whose musical stitches and designs were being shown off for the first time in public.

Most singers consider the program foolhardy that has more than two songs by living composers--but not 44-year-old Janet Fairbank. In eight New York concerts she has given more than 100 songs by some two dozen composers their first performance. She gets pieces still in manuscript, spends all summer studying them with an accompanist. ("You have to practice them until it seems as easy as Schubert.") A year ago every song Janet Fairbank sang was purchased by publishers the morning after the recital. This year the publishers didn't wait. They bought almost her entire program before the recital.

Most of Janet Fairbank's recitals lose money, a fact which doesn't concern her greatly. ("I figure I like to sing and it's worth it to me.") Grandfather N. K. Fairbank made his fortune in Gold Dust washing powder, among other things, and helped found the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Janet's mother is Novelist Janet Ayer (The Bright Land) Fairbank; her aunt is Pulitzer Prize Novelist Margaret Ayer (Years of Grace) Barnes. In a stone mansion on Chicago's State Street and on a gingerbready Victorian estate at Wisconsin's Lake Geneva, the Fairbanks entertained transient celebrities. Janet concentrated on the musicians. Says she: "It was like Grand Central Station. Everyone who came to Chicago went through our house. I always knew a lot of composers. Prokofiev and John Alden Carpenter were in & out of the house."

No Nut Stunt. After studying in Germany, she made her concert debut in Chicago, then sang with the San Carlo and Chicago Opera companies. In 1943 she sang a New York recital of American songs by Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, John Cage and others. Says Janet Fairbank: "People thought it was going to be a nut stunt. When I started, the American songs that were sung were mostly the 'I Love Life' type. I think I made people realize that there were good American songs. I always try to stay away from hackneyed things. Unless you are a Lotte Lehmann you can't do the old war horses. If I hear a song terribly well sung I don't want to sing it. I gloomily scratch it off my list."

Last week she sang song cycles by two great French song writers, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, and two songs by a 28-year-old Austrian, Gottfried von Einem, five by Paul Bowles and several by such unknown Americans as Everett B. Helm, Bela Wilda and Ned Rorem. Her voice was limited in range and occasionally harsh in the high notes, but as always, her interpretations were intelligent and distinguished by restraint.

Critics (many of whom are closet composers) so admire her service to music that they never give her a bad notice. Last week the New York Herald Tribune's second-string critic, Francis Perkins, read a book (Drew Middleton's Our Share of Night) through much of the program, finally seemed to sleep. The next day his review was the best she received.

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