Early Career
He made his debut in London (at the People's Palace, Mile End) in 1888, in Handel's Messiah, and in the next year appeared in Gounod's Redemption. In 1890 he made operatic debuts as Commendatore in Don Giovanni and as the Duke of Verona in Romeo et Juliette, at Covent Garden. Thereafter he elected to make his career in recital.
In oratorio, his first Festival appearance was at Worcester in 1890. Plunket Greene created the title part in Parry's Job, at the Gloucester Festival in 1892. This includes the Lamentation of Job, an extremely long (28 page) and sustained oratorio scena. David Bispham said of his performances that he 'created the part and rendered it many times with superb dramatic feeling.' In this, as in most of Parry's songs, Plunket Greene recognised the perfect declamation of Parry's writing, the accent upon word-values falling naturally and correctly in the music. As a result he became the original exponent or dedicatee of many of the lyrical works of Parry, and also of Battison Haynes ('Off to Philadelphia'), and of Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford wrote 'Songs of the Sea' for him. Although his voice was not exceptionally powerful he used it with great style, musicianship and intelligence.
In 1891 George Bernard Shaw found him 'fairly equal to the occasion in the wonderful duet' from Bach's Whitsuntide Canatata, O, Ewiges Feuer, with the Bach Choir. In April 1892 (sharing the platform with Joseph Joachim and Neruda, Fanny Davies, Alfredo Piatti and Agnes Zimmermann (piano)) he sang admirably in his first set (Lully, Cornelius and Schumann) in a Monday Popular Concert, but made little of his second group. In November 1893 at the first of George Henschel's London Symphony Orchestra concerts for the season he performed Stanford's new song, Prince Madoc's Farewell, so patriotically 'that he once or twice almost burst into the next key.' Shaw's strictures on his diction were no doubt taken very seriously by the singer, who studied to make absolute clarity and naturalness of diction a central point of his teaching and example.
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