Ten Aussie tenors

While Australia has produced a regal procession of sopranos over the course of a century and more, the tenors are not so well-remembered, none being in the Caruso/Pavarotti class, but here are ten that we’re including in ‘From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record’:

Browning Mummery (above)
Alfred O’Shea
Lionello Cecil (Lionel Cecil Sherwood)
Max Worthley
Harold Blair
Ronald Dowd
Kenneth Neate
John Lanigan
Donald Smith
Albert Lance

As a young man, the earliest of them, Browning Mummery, sang with Nellie Melba at her famous 'Farewell' to Covent Garden in 1926, and the latest, the wonderful Albert Lance, sang with Maria Callas at her equally famous debut at the Opéra in Paris in 1958.

Here’s Albert Lance in Tosca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoGaCvdYVs

Running through the Winter’s Journey

Over the last century good Australian tenors have been something like hen’s teeth. So first to hear Stuart Skelton as Peter Grimes, and then just a couple of weeks later Dominic Walsh in Schubert’s great song cycle, Winterreise, has been a double treat.

I was lucky enough to catch the young Mr Walsh in a private run-through at the Peckham home of his accompanist, the fine Schubertian pianist (and another Australian), Geoffrey Saba. Dominic Walsh was an Australian Music Foundation award-winner in 2012 and Geoffrey Saba has been mentoring him. We the privileged audience numbered just five.

Walsh and Saba are taking this saddest of sad works of lost love to Australia, with Saba then going on to Indonesia, so if you want to catch it, this is where they will be:

Melbourne: November 23, 24

Stanley Park, near Newcastle: November 30
Sydney: December 1 (Saba solo)
Medan, Indonesia: December 6 (Saba solo)
Surabaya, Indonesia: December 10, 11 (Saba solo)