Men of Empire: Audio Encyclopedia 001
 
Reviewed by Mike Leone
 

Singers of Empire: left and right Australians Peter Dawson (1882-1961), and Horace Stevens (1874-1954), and centre the Scot, Fraser Gange (1886-1962)
 
John McCormack and Friends
 
'Men of Empire' was the first of Mike Richter's series of recorded opera and vocal music on CD-ROM called the 'Audio Encyclopedia'. The choice of the word 'encyclopedia' to describe the series is not a fortuitous one. As Mike says in his description of the proposed series, ". . . an audio encyclopedia resembles its paper cousin. It is a reference work, not a comprehensive treatment, and it supports locating authoritative sources rather than being one." He goes on to say that his other intention, one that he has consistently maintained through the series, is to inspire publishers to find and issue the material he is presenting, as well as similar material, in more accessible formats and in superior sound, although I have had no difficulty with the sound quality of these discs. (Then again, see my final comment in this month's companion review of the Mapleson CD-ROM.)
 
When I look at the January 1997 contact information for Richter contained on this disc, I am reminded how at that time I had not paid my first visit to the Internet, and indeed did not yet have a home computer. Now, over four years later, and a proud owner of a home computer for almost two of those years, I have played most of the discs of the series and think that in themselves they justify any opera lover's owning a computer. Richter's formal series now numbers 19 discs; and the House of Opera, who distributes the discs, has also jumped on the CD-ROM bandwagon with a disc containing 18 performances of Tosca dating from 1952 (Mexico City, of course) through 1997. I will be reviewing the Tosca disc next month, although after listening to 18 Toscas I may have to write the review from an insane asylum! In any event, thanks to Mike's pioneering work, the future of opera on CD-ROMs looks bright.
 
But to get back to the disc under consideration, 'Men of Empire' contains 275 recordings made by 38 male singers of the British Empire born in the 19th century. The recordings come mostly from the collection of Harold Byrnes and are generally in excellent condition.
 
Of the singers represented here, Sir Charles Santley is the oldest of the group: born in 1834, he was 69 (70 according to Steane) when he made the recordings on this disc, and he would continue to record for almost six more years. By the way, Sir Charles's Valentin inspired Gounod to compose for him 'Even bravest heart may swell', later translated back into 'Avant de quitter ces lieux', for interpolation into Faust. The babies of the batch, Harry Wendon and the more prominent John Brownlee, barely pass muster with a birth date of 1900. None of the singers, with the possible exception of Roy Henderson, whose date of death is not known, survived into the 1980s.
 
There are four featured singers on the disc: John McCormack, Peter Dawson, Horace Stevens, and Fraser Gange. Each of these four rates his own page.
 

 

John McCormack (1884-1945)
 
Of the singers on this disc, John McCormack (1884-1945), the Irish tenor par excellence, is certainly the best known. His recordings have been reissued numerous times, particularly in comprehensive LP sets on the Pearl label. Because his recordings have circulated so extensively, 'Men of Empire' limits itself to his relatively rare Odeons made between 1906 and 1909. Since previous reissues of the Odeons have more than likely presented them at the wrong speed, extra care has been taken with the recordings on this disc to put them in proper pitch. (On some of the Odeons, Richter and Byrnes were unable to agree on pitch, and so those recordings were omitted.) For the rarity of the Odeon recordings alone, this disc is required for the McCormack fan. The listener wanting to play through the Irish tenor's selections as an entity has the choice of following two different indices, one arranged by date and matrix, the other by composer.
 
McCormack's (and Odeon's?) preferences in music were already obvious at this stage, as 11 of the 60 recordings included here are of Irish songs; these appear at the end of the index arranged by composer, and give more than sufficient idea of his affinity for this music. Among the many other treasures here, we are vouchsafed two recordings of his signature tune, 'I Hear You Calling Me', both made at the same recording session in 1908, one with piano and one with orchestra. Balancing the 11 Irish airs are 11 arias from English, French and Italian operas. To judge from the evidence here, McCormack must not have been particularly comfortable singing in French at this time, as the arias from Carmen and Mignon are in Italian and English respectively (there's also a lovely 'Spirto gentil' in Italian, but La favorite was almost always performed in Italian at the time anyway). There are also four songs by Tosti: 'Ideale', 'L'ultima canzone', 'Parted' and 'Voi dormite, signora', the latter two of which were unfamiliar to me. (Tosti is one of my favorite composers, so I'm happy to note that there are an additional three songs by him on here, two sung by Alfred Piccaver and one by Tom Burke.)
 
If McCormack is the best-known of the singers here, certainly the one this listener believes to possess the most distinctive voice is Peter Dawson (1882-1961). Dawson is a comparative rarity among singers in that his prolific recording career - over 3000 recordings - stretched from the acoustic period to the advent of stereo. (The recording career of George Baker, another singer featured here, was of comparable length, although he did not record as extensively throughout those years.) Given the number of recordings Dawson made, it is doubly amazing that the Grove Dictionaries completely ignore him. His actual performing career went on much longer still, given that he sang a solo at a birthday party at the age of six, and made his first public appearance at the age of eight.
 
It is only appropriate that, with his 3000 recordings, Peter Dawson should have more recordings here than even McCormack, and so it is: there are 70 of his recordings here, spanning a number of styles. His is the only recording on this disc of that perennial favorite 'The Kerry Dance' (if you don't recognize the name, you'll recognize the melody; it's one of those that sits in the collective subconscious). Another one of my favorites here is the delightful 'O ruddier than the cherry' from Handel's Acis and Galatea (there's another recording of the piece on this disc by Andrew Black). Peter Dawson's range encompassed both baritone and bass music; accordingly he sings Mephistopheles in the final trio from Faust, but also appears in the big tenor-baritone duets from Forza and Bohème as well; Ernest Pike is the tenor in all three of these selections and A. Yarrow is the soprano in Faust. Another interesting recording is Rudyard Kipling's 'Barrackroom Ballads', which Dawson himself wrote under the name of Cobb.
 
I said that there were 38 male singers here but the actual number is closer to 39. The reason for my vacillation is that one of the more curious recordings on this disc is a duet by Parry called 'Flow Gently, Deva' identified as being sung by Peter Dawson and female tenor Ruby Helder. Madame Helder was also born in the nineteenth century, in either 1890 or 1891, and died in 1938. Another connection she has to the other singers on this disc is that her teacher for five years was the old man of the series, Sir Charles Santley (Dawson studied and toured with him as well); Sir Charles found Helder's voice to be a "natural and pure tenor of great beauty and power"; physicians agreed and found that her vocal equipment was characteristic of that belonging to a tenor rather than a contralto. She certainly sounds like a tenor. (It is worth noting that Christian Zwarg has conjectured that this recording is really by two lesser-known singers, dubbed at the wrong pitch.)
 
In contrast with Peter Dawson, who was already performing in public at a very early age, Horace Stevens (1874-1954), the third of the featured singers here, with 26 recordings, did not appear professionally until he was over 40 years old. Unlike both McCormack and Dawson, Stevens had an extensive operatic career; he sang a number of the big Wagnerian bass roles as well as others such as Falstaff, Mephistopheles, Prince Igor and Ramfis. Several of my favorite recordings on this disc are by Stevens, including Hatton's 'Simon the Cellarer' (there's also another recording by Sir Charles), the Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque 'I am a roamer' from Mendelssohn's Sons and Strangers (there are also acoustic and electric recordings of this piece by Malcolm McEachern), and the delightful 'Sulla Poppa' from Il prigione d'Edinburgo by the brothers Ricci, who are best known for 'Io non sono più l'Annetta' from Crispino e la comare, which Joan Sutherland, another singer of the British Empire, recorded as part of her 'Command Performance' album and performed as the encore in her 1987 concert tour.
 

 

Fraser Gange in the studio
 
The fourth of our prominent singers is Scottish baritone Fraser Gange (1886-1962). His recording career was truncated rather early, as he did not record past the late 1920s; accordingly, there are only 16 recordings of his here, including a very beautiful 'Ombra mai fu' from Handel's Xerxes. We are, however, fortunate to have here a 1954 rehearsal recording of 'Honour and arms' from Handel's Samson made when he was 68 years old at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where he taught from 1932 until his death. The disc also includes a longer biography of Fraser Gange by Patty Fagan and John Graves, who also provided many of the baritone's recordings for the disc.
 
Of the 34 other singers represented here, most of them have acquired at least some degree of fame outside the British Empire, and brief biographies of all 34 are provided. At the risk of slighting some of the others, I'll name the ones I am most familiar with: John Brownlee, who was in Melba's Covent Garden farewell and made a couple of recordings with her after that; Lionello Cecil, who recorded Pinkerton to Margaret Sheridan's Butterfly in 1931; Edward Johnson, who was general manager of the Met from 1935 to 1950; Heddle Nash, who sang in a couple of the famous Glyndebourne Mozart recordings from the mid-1930s (as did Roy Henderson, also represented on this disc); Alfred Piccaver, one of the few non-Germans the Viennese ever named an 'Honored Artist'; and Walter Widdop, a tenor who figured in some of the more important Wagner recordings from the early part of the century.
 
My biggest 'discovery' was John O'Sullivan, James Joyce's favorite singer, who contributes powerful recordings of 'O muto asil' from Guglielmo Tell and two arias from Verdi's Otello. One of the more important recordings here is Percy Heming's recording of Amfortas's Lament from Parsifal, given that Heming was the first Englishman to sing the role. (Norman Allin, the first English Gurnemanz, is also presented here, although not in that role.) Another curiosity is Sir Georg Henschel's four included recordings, made while he was in his mid 60s and his late 70s, and in all of which he accompanies himself on the piano. And then there is Frederick Ranalow, whose three recordings from Gay's Beggar's Opera serve as a souvenir of his 1,463 performances as Macheath. Finally, there is super basso profundo Malcolm McEachern, who descends into the cellar for us in the appropriately named 'In Cellar Cool' by Fischer (better known by its German title 'Im tiefem Keller').
 
The listener who wants to play the entire disc through has the option of playing the recordings in alphabetical order of composer, or in alphabetical order of singer. The latter will enable one, for example, to compare Louis Graveure's baritone recordings (such as the Pagliacci Prologue) with his tenor recordings (such as the love duet from Butterfly with Margherita Perras). The four 'featured' singers, having their own pages, do not figure into the alphabetical listing by singer, although all of their recordings are included in the alphabetical listing by composer. Unlike the other recordings in the Audio Encyclopedia, 'Men of Empire' must be played on the computer; because the recordings on this disc are in the form of WAV files, the disc cannot be played on an MP3 player.
 
Certainly the scope of this disc is rather limited, but within that limit there is quite a variety of music here, ranging from opera to traditional songs and McCormack's Irish airs, with oratorio and art songs from various countries appearing along the way. For somebody like me who has spent so much of his life listening to operas, composers and singers of French, Italian, and German extraction, I found listening to the disc to be not only a very enjoyable experience, but a very educational one as well.
 
'Men of Empire' is a CD-ROM published by Mike Richter, AE001 US$ 14.95.
 
Related website:
 
Additional information and a source for ordering can be found at Mike Richter www.mrichter.com/
 
© Mike Leone, 28 April 2001
Houston, Texas
lionman299@yahoo.com