Peter Dawson (singer)

Peter Dawson (born January 31, 1882 in Adelaide , † September 26, 1961 in Sydney , pseudonyms including Leonhard Dawson , Hector Grant and Phil Strong ) was an Australian singer with a bass-baritone voice .

Life

Peter Dawson was the youngest of six children in the family of a Scottish immigrant who, after retiring as a captain, had built a metalworking business. After taking singing lessons with a music teacher named CJ Stevens in Adelaide, Dawson, who was also a boxer at the time, won a singing competition at Ballarat, Australia , with a bass solo . This helped convince his father, who had intended him for a career in the metal industry, to send him to England instead to study singing .

In London in 1902 Dawson became a pupil of the baritone Charles Santley after he had sung the aria "O Ruddier than the Cherry" from George Frideric Handel's Masque Acis and Galatea . Like Waltzing Matilda or The Floral Dance later, the piece became Dawson's calling card.

Dawson made his concert debut in 1903 with Emma Albani at the Guildhall in Plymouth . A year later he made his first recording on a phonograph cylinder as "Leonhard Dawson" with the ballad To My First Love . The first record Navajo (also Navahoe ) followed in the same year. In 1907 and 1909 Dawson played the role of the night watchman in Richard Wagner's Mastersingers at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden .

During World War I , Dawson volunteered with the Australian troops, and during World War II , too old for military service, he helped in his family's factory. As a singer, Dawson lived and worked mainly in England. In 1956 he ended his career and returned to his native Australia.

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Peter Dawson was also successful as an opera singer , but his real profession was concert singing and the record. The opera means “too much work for too little pay”, he is supposed to have said. He also felt like a "singer of the people". He recorded an estimated 3,000 records, the majority of which were songs , but also arias from oratorios and operas, which he always performed in the English version. The hallmarks of his powerful bass baritone, which he kept until he was 70, were impeccable diction and technique.

Peter Dawson published his first recordings under up to 20 pseudonyms , some of which he assigned to individual genres. He sang Scottish folk songs as Hector Grant and popular music as Phil Strong . Other artist names were Geoffrey Baxter , Charles Handy , Charles Stander , Robert Woodville , Will Strong , Frank Danby , Peter Allison , Denton Thomas , Charles Webber , Gilbert Mundy , Arnold Flint and JP McColl .

In recognition of his achievements, Peter Dawson was posthumously inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1991.

Modern discography

• A Green and Pleasant Land. Peter Dawson Sings Traditional Favorites (Pearl Pavilion Records 1988)
• The Connoisseur's Peter Dawson (Pearl Pavilion Records 1998)
• Peter Dawson: The Ultimate Collection (Prism Leisure Corporation 1999)

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Dawson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Dawson in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 7, 2nd Edition, London 2001, p. 85.
2. ↑ ibid.
3. ^ ARIA Hall of Fame. Australian Recording Industry Association , accessed August 6, 2017 .