The Three Tenors of ’90s réclame were sons of the EuroAmerican South. Here now come elevenfold their number from the EuroBrexit North. Thirty-one of them, sitting on my plate like the local’s Sunday Roast, inhabit Marston’s newest release, a three-CD set entitled “A Survey of British Tenors Before Peter Pears.” They are presented in alphabetical order, which means that by happenstance the sequence opens and closes with tenors of marked similarities, one of them (Dan Beddoe) a Welsh-born singer who made his career almost entirely in the U.S., and the other (Evan Williams) of U.S. origin but Welsh descent, who sang extensively in the U.K. and immersed himself in its oratorio and concert tradition. By “marked similarities” I don’t mean that Beddoe and Williams sound exactly alike (and they are singing very different pieces here, Beddoe the two essentially lyrical ones from Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Williams the martial “Sound an Alarm” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus). I mean simply that both possess hefty voices that are always engaged with firm support, not wispy ones that dally around on the surface; that as a result they sustain a steady line with even vibrato; and that with occasional minor lapses (Beddoe allowing weak syllables on short notes to cheat the indicated vowel, as in “rightch’s” for “righteous,” Williams sometimes neglecting final “d’s,” as in “soun'” or “aroun'”) they sculpt their words with the completeness of the great 19th-Century elocutionists, to which their singing styles are so closely related (and vice-versa). And they are two of the finest among the thirty-one, with the warmth and easy largeness of Beddoe’s tone and the fervency of his emotional connection (hear the longing ache at “O, that I knew/where I might find Him”) the better captured by his early (1926) electrical recording, but Williams’ rock-steady sound and musical surety coming through just fine on this expectably excellent transfer of his 1904 acoustical.
The recordings assembled here range from 1901 (Ben Davies singing Bishop’s My Pretty Jane, and William Green with John Braham’s The anchor’s weighed) to 1950 (James Johnston with the “Song of the road” from Vaughan Williams’ Hugh the Drover, which brings us to the dividing line the set’s compilers (I) see with Peter Pears.) There are seventy-five selections in all. Some of these tenors—principally those who achieved significant reputations in opera, and most of them from the electrical era—are well known to serious vocal collectors. They would include Joseph Hislop, Heddle Nash, Webster Booth, and Walter Widdop, in addition to John McCormack, who offers three songs. I was familiar with several more via grazing encounters, and with a number of others by reputation only. But nine of them, by my unofficial count, were new to me even by name. So a considerable light is shone into this corner of vocal history, at least for me, and has somewhat revised my assumptions about it. When I thought about it at all, I held a vague notion of it as the home of McCormacks manqués, or tenors of the Ralph Rackstraw/Nanki-Poo Fach, of greater or lesser endowment. And a few of these might fit that description—Tom Burke with an expert “O vision entrancing” from Goring Thomas’ Esmeralda, for instance (opening out rather surprisingly to a superb high B-flat), or Walter Glynne with an impeccably declaimed and intoned rendering of the Messiah sequence running from “Thy rebuke hath broken his heart” through “But thou didst not leave his soul in Hell.”
Footnotes
| ↑I | These include Ward Marston himself; Stephen Clarke, who is Chairman of the Historic Singers Charitable Trust and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, and who apparently had the originating idea for the compilation; and Michael Aspinall, who contributes his well-informed vocal and biographical commentary to the accompanying booklet. |
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