Notable for his burnished baritone, genial character and seemingly easy vocal projection, Benjamin Luxon, who has died aged 87, was profitable in such contrasting genres as opera, oratorio, lieder, people music and Victorian parlour ballads.
Stricken in his early 50s by a uncommon auto-immune illness that precipitated him to lose his listening to, he was pressured to desert his worldwide profession, settling in rural Massachusetts the place he was in a position to deploy his dramatic abilities as an actor, director and reciter – not least of Victorian poems and songs.
He made his debut with Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group in 1963, happening to sing such roles as Sid (Albert Herring), Tarquinius (The Rape of Lucretia) and Demetrius (A Midsummer Evening’s Dream), in addition to Purcell’s King Arthur, till 1970. He got here to larger prominence when he undertook the title function in Britten’s tv opera Owen Wingrave (1971), written specifically for him, subsequently singing the Jester, Demise and Joking Jesus in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner at Covent Backyard (1972). Different roles he sang for the Royal Opera included Owen Wingrave, Onegin, Wolfram (Tannhäuser), Marcello (La Bohème), Falke (Die Fledermaus) and Diomede (William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida). He received equal acclaim at English Nationwide Opera and Glyndebourne and was a agency fixture on the oratorio circuit too.
In works by Edward Elgar, he sang the Priest/Angel of the Agony in Alexander Gibson’s recording of Dream of Gerontius (1976) and the function of St Peter in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of The Kingdom (1988). The Gerontius roles have been notable for his or her benignity, in addition to their authority, whereas his St Peter radiated intense humanity, even when a large vibrato was turning into more and more intrusive. Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast he recorded twice, for Georg Solti and André Previn.
One of many final main recordings he made was because the baritone soloist in Robert Shaw’s recording of Britten’s Warfare Requiem with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (1989). It’s a characteristically persuasive efficiency which demonstrated that Luxon’s musical response to the textual content was nonetheless sovereign, and it’s no coincidence that his readings of Wilfred Owen’s poetry have been so extremely regarded within the years that adopted.
On a much less elegant degree, he appeared regularly on the programme High Cs and Tiaras, created for Channel 4 within the early Nineteen Eighties to deliver common classical music to a large, mainstream public. Whether or not in his spellbinding Ol’ Man River or in saccharine Victorian ballads, there was an simple sincerity in his supply to which audiences responded. Nor was he too proud to stroll on in his lengthy johns, with crown and medals, because the monarch in Danny Kaye’s music The King’s New Garments. Or to sit down at breakfast in his pyjamas delivering Two Little Sausages from the Edwardian musical comedy The Women of Gottenberg.
In tandem with the tenor Robert Tear he combed the repertory of Victorian and Edwardian ballads rendered by their bewhiskered predecessors. Michael William Balfe’s Come Into the Backyard, Maud, and Julius Benedict’s The Moon has Raised her Lamp Above have been among the many gems recorded, with Previn on the piano, on a pair of discs titled The Dicky Fowl and the Owl (1973) and Dwelling, Candy Dwelling (1976).
Luxon was additionally a well-liked exponent of such tearjerkers as Give Me a Ticket to Heaven (1978) on The Good Outdated Days, a long-running BBC present recreating the atmosphere of the music corridor. Underneath the identical title as that music he made a recording of comparable repertory (1976) along with his common accompanist, David Willison.
Born in Redruth, Cornwall, Benjamin was the son of Ernest Luxon, an novice singer, and his American spouse, Lucille (nee Grigg). After Truro college and nationwide service he went to London to review at Westminster Coaching School and the Guildhall Faculty of Music, because it was then recognized. Missing a musical coaching of any actual rigour, he launched his profession with the usual classical repertory in live shows and recitals up and down the nation, a “baptism of fireside” as he later described it. “If coaching did come, it was relatively late in life and a little bit bit sketchy,” he mentioned.
However his expertise was recognised by Britten, and their 13-year collaboration offered a serious increase to his profession. His Posa in Don Carlos at ENO in 1974 was singled out by one critic as “the really excellent efficiency of the manufacturing” – although it was his first Verdi function – his phrasing, legato line and feeling for phrases being particularly praised. In the identical yr he joined Peter Corridor’s manufacturing of Eugene Onegin at Covent Backyard, the place his mellifluous tone and absolutely rounded portrayal of the title function have been equally acclaimed. He went on to file the work twice: with Mstislav Rostropovich (1982) and Seiji Ozawa (1986).
A daily at Glyndebourne between 1971 and 1980, he sang the roles of Onegin, Ulysses (The Return of Ulysses), Rely Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro), the Forester (Crafty Little Vixen), Ford (Falstaff), Don Giovanni and Papageno (The Magic Flute) there. His incarnation of Ulysses, alongside Janet Baker as Penelope, was accounted a specific success, whereas The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Corridor with Kiri Te Kanawa because the Countess and Ileana Cotrubas as Susanna, was filmed for tv in 1973 and launched as a DVD in 2004. His heat, sympathetic, dramatically clever Wozzeck was heard in Glasgow (beneath Gibson), Los Angeles (beneath Simon Rattle) and Chicago (beneath Claudio Abbado).
As a lieder singer too he introduced an interesting, fine-grained tonal high quality and an expressive response to the textual content in each Franz Schubert and English repertory reminiscent of Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Eire, George Butterworth, Herbert Howells and Roger Quilter. He was appointed CBE in 1986.
Following some troubling warning indicators, the catastrophic, career-ending listening to loss got here fairly abruptly throughout a Schubert music cycle in 1990. Unable to find out the pitch of notes whereas warming up, even from totally different ends of the piano, he began the recital solely to look at perplexed seems on the faces of the viewers. Conscious that one thing was critically fallacious, he introduced the efficiency to an in depth.
Two days later he was completely deaf in a single ear and the sound within the different was critically distorted. After therapy with steroids, chemotherapy and a cochlear implant, he tried a return to the stage on a decreased schedule, however after two years determined to retire. In the end he got here to phrases along with his listening to loss, describing his subsequent life as “very wealthy”.
In 1969 he married the Israeli soprano Sheila Amit, they usually had two sons and a daughter. Following their divorce in 2002, he married Susie Crofut, the widow of the American people singer Invoice Crofut, with whom he had carried out for a few years. She and his youngsters survive him.
