Peter Dawson (bass-baritone) - Bright is the Ring of Words (Vaughan Williams) (1922)

Peter Dawson sings 'Bright is the Ring of Words,' with piano by Madame Adami, recorded at Hayes on 26 April 1922.

From Wikipedia: Peter Smith Dawson (31 January 1882 – 27 September 1961) was an Australian bass-baritone and songwriter...

Although Dawson's repertoire embraced a great deal of contemporary popular songs and light music, he possessed a remarkably fluent and technically adroit vocal technique which enabled him to excel in highly demanding classical pieces. His voice combined an attractive dark timbre with an ideal balance of diction and vocal placement. He also possessed a smooth legato, a strong but integrated 'attack' that eschewed intrusive aspirates, and a near-perfect ability to manage running passages and difficult musical ornaments such as roulades...

[I]n his chosen field of English concert pieces of the vigorous, manly, outdoors kind, he remains unequalled. The tremendously high technical finish of his Handelian singing sets an unmatched standard, too...

Peter Dawson was born in 1882 in Adelaide, South Australia, to immigrant Scottish parents... At the age of 17 he joined a church choir and received singing lessons from C.J. Stevens. Then, aged 19, he won a prize for the best bass solo in a competition at Ballarat, Victoria, and began taking up concert engagements...

He was sent to London to be taught by Sir Charles Santley, who first sent him to F. L. Bamford of Glasgow for six months' basic training and coaching in vocal exercises, arias, oratorio pieces and classical songs. He then studied from 1903 to 1907 with Santley...

He attended a large number of performances at Covent Garden during the first decade of the 20th century, and heard many of the leading lower-voiced male singers of the age...

On 20 May 1905, he married Annie Mortimer 'Nan' Noble... Around this time, a Russian medical specialist assisted him to extend his upper range, until his compass extended from E-flat in the bass to a high A or A-flat. In 1909, he appeared at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden... However, he did not find the pressures of the opera stage to be a congenial fit with his easygoing personality, and he elected instead to forge an alternative career as a concert and oratorio singer...

Dawson...made a successful six-month tour of Australia with the Amy Castles company of singers. On his return, he began appearing in Promenade Concerts. A second long tour with his own company in Australia and New Zealand ended with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914...

After the war...Dawson returned to England... A British tour ensued with International Celebrity Concerts, involving recitals of operatic numbers. Accompanied on the piano by Gerald Moore, he then gave lieder recitals at the Wigmore Hall in 1924. An extensive Australian tour (his sixth) occurred in 1931, and he paid further visits to his homeland in 1933, 1935, early 1939 and 1948–49. He made an extensive singing tour of India, Burma and the Straits Settlements during the 1930s; he also visited Ireland. His first BBC radio broadcast was made in 1931... [and] he subsequently became a prolific broadcaster, and was still active 'on air' as late as the 1950s...

His last public performance was a concert for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in his home town of Adelaide, in January 1961. He died of heart failure in Sydney in September of that year and was buried in Rookwood Cemetery.

The gramophone was a major factor in the promotion and progression of Dawson's career. He made his first 78-rpm acoustic recordings in 1904, and continued to release songs...until 1958...

Dawson's repertoire was essentially adapted to the purposes of the recital platform... He was an advocate of singing in English, and ensured that his diction was of the utmost clarity when he sang.

He owed to his vocal mentor Charles Santley a taste and technique perfectly suited to oratorio... Handel standards...and Mendelssohn...remained constantly in his work. He sang Elgar roles in exemplary fashion, too...[together with] concert operatic titles...

The art of the German Lied attracted him also... Russian standards also appeared in his recital programs... Most of these songs were sung in English.

However, it was in British song that Dawson was especially famous, and his career helped to preserve the concert recital, and many of the older ballad type of songs, at a time when other forms of popular music were displacing the Victorian standards. He was particularly successful with the heartier, rollicking type of song...


I transferred this side from an English pressing of HMV B 1355.