New Work in Opera and Oratorio
1908 saw much oratorio, with Handel's The Messiah (Wood, Queen's Hall), Gerontius (with Coates, Manchester, under Richter), Elgar's King Olaf (Norwich Festival), Judas in The Apostles (Liverpool), Bach's Phoebus and Pan (Queen's Hall), and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. His first Covent Garden lead appearance was Gunther (Götterdämmerung) in Richter's English Ring cycle, repeated three times in February 1909. Late in 1908 he and Cyril Scott gave a recital of Scott's songs at the Bechstein Hall.
At the Sheffield Festival of 1908 he was exceptionally busy, with performances of Samson et Dalila, Schumann's Paradise and the Peri, Walford Davies’ Everyman, Beethoven's Choral Symphony, and L’Enfant Prodigue of Debussy, specially re-scored by the composer, and delivered under Henry Wood with Austin, Agnes Nicholls, and the tenor Felix Senius. At this Festival also on 6 October he gave the English première (following the Essen, 1906, first) of Delius’ Sea Drift. Wood chose Austin as the only man ‘who could be trusted to sing it con amore.’ He sang it again in December, and in February 1909, for Beecham: Birmingham first heard it in 1912.
Austin premiered Granville Bantock's Omar Khayyam Part III (Birmingham 1909), and in that year sang The Apostles (Judas) and Parry's Job at Hereford. At Liverpool in September 1909 was the first Festival of The Musical League, created by English composers for performance of their music; Austin's symphonic poem Isabella appeared, and he sang in Ethel Smyth's The Dance and Anacreontic Ode, Havergal Brian's By the Waters of Babylon, and Vaughan Williams’ cantata Willow-wood.
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