Viennese Singer's Wide Repertoire Thrills Audience

The charming genius of Viennese folk-singer Martha Schlamme graced John Hancock Hall last Thursday evening. Miss Schlamme, whose repertoire includes songs in at least a dozen different languages, captivated her audience for two hours with her interpretations of many styles of song.

Miss Schlamme is blessed with a lovely lyric soprano voice and displays great sensitivity toward her material. Taking the audience into her confidence, she prefaced each song with a brief analysis of its contents, making it understandable regardless of its foreign words. But only to hear Miss Schlamme is to miss half the performance. Her capabilities as an actress showed time and time again through her animated expressions and gestures that turned each song into a vividly told story.

The mood of her songs varied greatly. Her deeply moving performance of the Irish "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye," the song from which we get the more familiar "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," left the audience breathless. In sharp contrast, her version of "There's a Hole in the Bucket" drew loud laughs.

Miss Schlamme, a native of Austria, was driven from her home by the Nazis during the War. In the course of her flight to England and later to America, she traveled through many different countries and discovered that singing was a universal means of communication. This she demonstrated very effectively when she sang "Everybody Loves Saturday Night" in English, Africaans, French, Spanish, Russian, and Hebrew.