New Mezzo

Sure as the winter solstice, every music season brings to U.S. concert halls a U.S.-born singer who has already made it big in Europe. This season's entry is Mezzo-Soprano Grace Bumbry, 25, who made her Manhattan concert debut last week in Carnegie Hall. Her performance of Duparc songs, Italian songs, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt and Strauss lieder and Negro spirituals was eloquent exposition of a native talent that has been too long coming home.

A large woman with an erect carriage, Mezzo Bumbry stood a trifle self-consciously with hands clasped and head thrown back. But when she nodded to her accompanist and opened her mouth, her rich, bronzelike voice seemed to flood the hall. Her singing was brilliant and ringing at the top; she impressed her audience with an absolute control that permitted her to fade from full voice to soft-spun pianissimi that hushed the hall to admiring silence. If her attitudes sometimes seemed stagy, she was completely natural and quietly moving in Deep River, Sweet Little Jesus Boy, Stand by Me.

Mezzo Bumbry actually made her U.S. recital debut last winter--in Washington. Acting on the enthusiastic advice of friends who had heard the young singer in Europe, Jackie Kennedy invited Bumbry to sing at the White House after a state dinner (TIME. March 2). Daughter of a St. Louis railway clerk, Grace Bumbry became interested in music in a fashion familiar to many American Negroes --singing in a church choir. Scholarships took her to Boston University, Northwestern, and finally to Santa Barbara's Music Academy of the West to study with Lotte Lehmann, the great German-born soprano, who last week returned to the Met as a stage director.

Bumbry went to Europe in 1959, was chosen after a single audition to sing the lead in the Paris Opera production of Carmen and the following summer became the first Negro ever to sing at the Bayreuth Festival. But she still does not consider herself a Wagner singer. "My style," says Mezzo Bumbry, "is really Verdi. This is my heart and soul."

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