Junior Invasion

The U.S. concert stage last week became the beachhead for a two-pronged invasion, junior-size: Germany's Obernkirchen Children's Choir attacked in Manhattan, while the Little Singers of Paris took over Washington. Displaying powerful charm and undeniably high musicianship, the Gallic and Germanic youngsters (both groups will tour in the U.S. for about ten weeks) easily overpowered their pleased U.S. victims.

Palestrina to Berlin. The French, numbering 32 boys, wore knee pants and white stockings for the secular half of their program (seven, whose voices had changed, wore long pants), switched to white robes for sacred songs. They performed both with easy professionalism. Led by greying, bearlike Monsignor Fernand Maillet, 59, they bubbled with lighthearted precision in such frolics as Frere Jacques and Alouette, brilliantly worked their way through a difficult cantata written for them by Darius Milhaud, and spun out an incredibly pure, otherworldly tone in the age-old Gregorian chant, Tenebrae Factae Sunt.

The Little Singers of Paris have been a unit since 1907, inducting youthful recruits from working-class families as fast as oldtimers were mustered out. Eventually, they acquired a fine home in Paris, where more than 60 of them now live full time and are put through their rigorous musical training. At first, the youngsters sang only Gregorian chants and music by Palestrina and other austere polyphonists. By now they have relaxed enough to sing White Christmas, Danny Boy and She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain. The choir claims to be the most traveled in the world, with 1,000,000 miles under its feet, including five previous U.S. visits.

Brahms to Grimm. Their German colleagues, on their second visit in the U.S., included 31 girls and six boys. In bright red skirts and brown knee britches, they earnestly sang folk songs, lieder by Brahms and Schumann, warbled gay Renaissance madrigals. Most ambitious number on their program: The Bremen Town

Musicians, a choral fairy tale based on Grimm. Costumed soloists--donkey, dog, cat and rooster--almost turned the piece into a little opera.

The choir was directed by slender, thirtyish Edith Moeller, who used to be co-director of a district school for underprivileged and "difficult" children in the Saxon town of Obernkirchen (pop. 6,400). When the school building was commandeered for a hospital in 1946, she decided to organize a singing group ("Music has a beneficial influence on children"). She gathered children of local railroaders, lumber dealers, locksmiths, mechanics, polished up the kids' piping tones until they became as smooth as their scrubbed faces, and as crisp as the little girls' curtsies. The late Poet Dylan Thomas, who might have made a crackerjack press-agent if he had tried, called the Obernkirchen girls "angels in pigtails."

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