Sir thomas allen baritone biography of michael
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Thomas Allen has sung his last performance
Opera
norman lebrecht
July 29, 2024
An epoch has ended.
Alastair Macaulay reports from Glyndebourne:
Tonight, the British baritone Thomas Allen, aged seventy-nine, announced from the Glyndebourne stage that this had been his final performance; I wish I had been there. He had already informally announced his farewell to friends and few years ago, but Glyndebourne had tempted him back this year into “The Merry Widow”.
It feels as if a significant part of my life has said farewell. Allen was already in the ascendant at Covent Garden when I became a regular there just over fifty years ago. I remember in particular an October 1973 “Simon Boccanegra” starring Peter Glossop, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Boris Christoff in which the connoisseurs singled out Allen as Paolo and Robert Lloyd as Pietro.
I see now how Te Kanawa, Allen, and Lloyd were a golden generation of Covent Garden singers: in 1975, Te Kanawa and he were Marguérite and Valentin, sister and brother, in Covent Garden’s first production for many years of Gounod’s “Faust”. Of them, Allen was the most intelligent, the most versatile, and the most enduring. I’m lucky that I remember him in 1974 as a definitive Moralés (“Carmen”, with Te Kanawa as Micaëla) and definitive Schau • Thomas Allen may research to: • As the celebrated British baritone returns once more to Covent Garden, this time for Così fan tutte, Mansel Stimpson talks to him… Given his illustrious career, it is entirely appropriate that Sir Thomas Allen should feature on a website for his birthplace, Seaham Harbour in Durham, as a ‘local hero’. As it happens he has not seen it, but when I mention its existence and its reference to the physics teacher at his grammar school, Dennis Weatherley, who coached him in singing, his memories are immediately awakened. “He was much more than that,” he tells me. “I hate the term ‘Renaissance Man’ – and I’m sure that he would have too – but, although he taught science and had done scientific research in London during the war, he had a wider horizon. It went far beyond that. I saw him singing in operas and in oratorio and he was a truly cultured man. He taught me a little about Goethe, about Lieder, about symphonic music and all kinds of other things as well as becoming my voice coach. He pointed the way.” For Sir Thomas that way soon led to London and to the Royal College of Music. “Not wanting to leave the bosom of our close-knit family, I took a long time to settle down – but eventually I did, and it was definitely the correct thing to do because it put me in the right e
Thomas Allen
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