When she winds up her stint at the Plaza on Tuesday, Miss Valente will head west for her first appearance in Las Vegas, an occasion that fills her with both anticipation and apprehension. She is not a particularly imaginative performer and is more apt to grind a song down than to light it with life, a situation that is emphasized by the generally heavy and strident playing of her accompanying orchestra. Her recordings in English are made in London and are distributed in the United States by London Records.Īt the Persian Room, Miss Valente's lingual versatility and her ability to take off on flights of wordless vocalizing are her strongest points. She uses different musical arrangers for each language but her German, French and Italian recordings are all made in Berlin because, in her opinion, the technical, facilities are better there than in Paris or Rome. She makes six or seven albums a year aimed at specific language markets-two in French, two in Italian, one or two in English and one in German (in Germany, she says, albums do not sell as well as single disks). She contributes a cooking column to a German weekly paper, Das Neue Blatt, dictating it on tape wherever she hannens to he.Įven Miss Valente's recording activities have an unusual international aspect. She is very bad on baking but strong with garlic. This is when she indulges her penchant for cooking, which comes out French, Italian and Chinese. Miss Valente takes two or three months off each year from her international travels and settles clown at her home in Lugano, Switzerland, or at an apartment in Acapulco, Mexico. But during a three‐week stay in Japan she not only developed a Japanese repertory but also appeared on seven Japanese television programs on which she spoke the introductions to her longs in Japanese (“Phoneticaly,” she hastens to add). She was in Athens for only 10 days so she managed to master only a single Greek song.
Japanese and Greek are two rec nt additions to her repertory, the result of her determination to do a considerable part of her program in the language of the country she happens to be in. She sings in all six languages (Italian is the best for singing, she says) plus Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek and Japanese. Later she added English, Spanish and Swedish, but French is the language in which she feels in most at home. Miss Valente, who was born in France, oined the family act when she was 5 and grew up speaking French, Italian and German.
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