Ben Davies (tenor) - Concert Recital

Concert Recital

Bernard Shaw was thoroughly impressed by Ben Davies in a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah under Joseph Barnby at the Albert Hall in May 1892. In June 1893, sharing that platform with Adelina Patti and Charles Santley, he was distinguished in Handel's Deeper and deeper still - Waft her, angels (Jephtha), and in a monster performance of Sullivan's The Golden Legend at the Crystal Palace, with Mme Albani, George Henschel and others.

After 1893, in which year he also appeared with Edward Lloyd at the Norwich Festival, Davies's career moved largely to the concert platform. In that year he performed at the Chicago World's Fair. In the voyage concert of the Atlantic crossing his piano accompanist was a 14-year-old passenger, Thomas Beecham, travelling with his father, who later wrote: 'His was a voice of uncommon beauty, round, full, and expressive, less inherently tenor than baritone, and, like all organs of this mixed genre, thinning out perceptibly on top. Later on, the upper notes disappeared entirely, but the middle register preserved to the end... most of its former opulence and charm.' Davies soon became very popular in the United States, where he toured regularly.

In 1894 he was a soloist at the London Handel Festival alongside Mme Albani, Mme Melba, Edward Lloyd and Charles Santley: 'Mr Ben Davies, when remorselessly compelled in Waft her, angels, to walk his voice slowly up from A to A so deliberately as to allow every step to be scrutinized, had to confess to a marked "break" on F sharp, or thereabouts.' In July 1896 he took part in the first performance of Liza Lehmann's In a Persian Garden, with Mme Albani, Hilda Wilson and David Bispham, the composer accompanying. In the second series of Promenade Concerts, 1896, he made an appearance in a concert of nationalist flavour with the soprano Fanny Moody and organist Walter Hedgecock, and a choir of 400 boys. In 1897, at the sixth concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society (dedicated to 'Her Majesty's Record Reign'), he sang Frederick Cowen's Scena The Dream of Endymion under the composer's baton. He was with David Bispham at the thirteenth biennial Festival at Cincinnati (under Theodore Thomas), in 1898.

A grand occasion of 1902 was the British and American Festival Peace Concert at The Crystal Palace, London, in commemoration of the South African War, at which Ben Davies was among the British soloists led by Mme Albani, including Clara Butt and Charles Santley, and (for America) Bispham, Ella Russell and Belle Cole. He and Ella Russell, with Ada Crossley and David Ffrangcon-Davies, that year opened the Sheffield Festival (under Henry J. Wood) with a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah.

Nearly a decade later, he was among the soloists (with Agnes Nicholls, Ellen Beck, Edna Thornton, Thorpe Davies and Robert Radford) in J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor at the Queen's Hall, in the penultimate concert of the 1911 London Music Festival. That year he also toured Australia, his accompanist being Edward Goll, who married and settled in Melbourne and became a noted piano teacher there. In May 1912 he was, with Cicely Gleeson-White, Ada Crossley and Herbert Brown, in the soloist group with the London Choral Society to sing Beethoven's Choral Symphony for the Royal Philharmonic under the baton of Arthur Nikisch. In 1916 he sang an aria from Der Freischütz under Beecham for the Royal Philharmonic, and he sang in the July 1922 Centenary celebration concerts for the Royal Academy of Music - again in the Queen's Hall.