| Biography | Trevor Anthony was a Welsh bass singer. He came to prominence when, at the age of only 21, he won the bass solo competition at the Neath National Eisteddfod of 1934, and was encouraged by one of the adjudicators, the singer Henry Plunket Greene, to pursue a professional career. His tutor Gwilym R. Jones organised a local appeal fund to support a course of study in London, and Anthony studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1935 to 1939, under the tutelage of Norman Allin. He held the George Mence Smith scholarship, and at the end of his course won the Robert Radford Memorial Prize and the Rutson Memorial Prize.
During this period he sang in operatic performances in London and broadcast on Welsh radio. In 1937 he was appointed to the choir of Westminster Abbey, but his career was interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as a telegraphist in the Royal Navy. After the war he resumed his singing career and became a popular concert and oratorio artist. He impressed the conductor Thomas Beecham, who invited him to sing the part of King Mark in a broadcast performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in 1946.
From 1948 onward he appeared at Covent Garden and at a number of important music festivals, at Leeds, Edinburgh and Aldeburgh, under the direction of Benjamin Britten. In June 1958 it was he who created the part of the Voice of God in Britten's opera Noye's Fludde. Between 1946 and 1960 he appeared at the Proms concerts seven times, including performances as the bass soloist in Beethoven's ninth symphony in 1955 and in the same composer's Missa Solemnis in 1960, on both occasions conducted by Malcolm Sargent. He also appeared with the D'Oyly Carte opera company. |