Career
After working to tone down his Australian accent, Williams received a great deal of musicale, concert and oratorio work throughout England and began a long association with the Columbia Graphophone Company, making records under assumed names such as 'Geoffrey Spencer' as well as his own.
Williams made his operatic debut in 1921 as Wolfram in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. In 1929 he toured Australia with the pianist William Murdoch. Five years earlier, he had sung in the stage première of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha in London under the baton of Eugene Goossens. With the exception of the 1929 season, he would appear in all later performances of the work until 1939. He was also a famous Elijah in Mendelssohn's oratorio of the same name.
Williams appeared with most of the greatest conductors of his time, including Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Thomas Beecham. When in England he sang in every season of Sir Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts in 1921-51. An acclaimed performer in Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, Williams often worked with the composer. He sang at Elgar's memorial service in 1934 as well as at the coronation of King George VI in 1937.
In 1938, he was one of 16 eminent singers invited to take part in the first performance of the Serenade to Music, written by Vaughan Williams to mark Sir Henry Wood's Silver Jubilee as a conductor. Apart from the vocal beauty of his singing and overall musicianship, Harold Williams was renowned for his expansive breath control and for the clarity of his diction in English music. Although the concert hall was his natural milieu, he also performed such roles as Iago (Otello), Wolfram (Tannhäuser) and Tonio (Pagliacci) with the British National Opera Company until its demise in 1929. For 16 seasons, he also sang such parts as Mephistopheles (Faust) and Boris (Boris Godunov) at Covent Garden, in London.
Williams made a number of recordings which display the fine quality of his voice and the excellence of his singing technique. His 1933 English-language recording, with his countryman the acclaimed bass Malcolm McEachern, of "The Gendarmes' Duet" from Offenbach's opera Geneviève de Brabant is an enduring classic of the gramophone.
Having toured Australia in 1929 for J. & N. Tait, Williams was urged by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to return to his homeland for the Thomas Beecham tour of 1940. He proceeded to become an important touring soloist throughout the duration of World War II and also taught at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney. In September 1946, he took part in the concert marking the inauguration of the BBC Third Programme, singing in the Serenade to Music, with Isobel Baillie, Astra Desmond, Bradbridge White and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and chorus conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.
Read more about this topic: Harold Williams (baritone)
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