Peter Dawson (bass-baritone)
Peter Smith Dawson (31 January 188227 September 1961) was an Australian bass-baritone and songwriter. Dawson gained worldwide renown through song recitals and many best-selling recordings of operatic arias, oratorio solos and rousing ballads during a career spanning almost 60 years. Although Dawson's repertoire embraced a great deal of contemporary popular songs and light music, he possessed a remarkably fluent and technically adroit vocal technique, which enabled him to excel in highly demanding classical pieces. His voice combined an attractive dark timbre with an ideal balance of diction and vocal placement. He also possessed a smooth legato, a strong but integrated "attack" that eschewed intrusive aspirates, and a near-perfect ability to manage running passages and difficult musical ornaments such as roulades. These skills probably derived from his studies with Sir Charles Santley, a virtuoso English baritone of the Victorian era. If Dawson's interpretations were not profoundly penetrating, they were not shallow either; and in his chosen field of English concert pieces of the vigorous, manly, outdoors kind, he remains unequalled. The tremendously high technical finish of his Handelian singing sets an unmatched standard, too. In 1984, Dawson was chosen by the Guinness Book of Recorded Sound as one of the top 10 singers on disc of all time, listed alongside Elvis Presley and operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. In 2007, Peter Dawson's 1931 recording of the song Along the Road to Gundagai was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry. Early career Peter Dawson was born in 1882 in Adelaide, South Australia, to immigrant Scottish parents, Thomas Dawson, an ironworker, plumber and seaman from Kirkcaldy and Alison, née Miller. The youngest of nine children, he attended East Adelaide Primary School, then Pulteney Street School. At the age of 17, he joined a church choir and received singing lessons from C.J. Stevens. Then, aged 19, he won a prize for the best bass solo in a competition at Ballarat, Victoria, and began taking up concert engagements. He was a featured singer at the 1901 Christmas performance of Messiah at the Adelaide Town Hall. He was sent to London to be taught by Sir Charles Santley, who first sent him to F.L. Bamford of Glasgow for six months' basic training and coaching in vocal exercises, arias, oratorio pieces and classical songs. He then studied from 1903 to 1907 with Santley, who gave him a thorough training in voice production and a meticulous understanding of the great oratorios, especially Handel's Messiah, Mendelssohn's Elijah and Haydn's The Creation. In 1904, he joined Santley on an eight-week concert tour of the West of England with the soprano Emma Albani. He attended a large number of performances at Covent Garden during the first decade of the 20th century and heard many of the leading lower-voiced male singers of the age, including the baritones Titta Ruffo, Pasquale Amato, Mattia Battistini, Mario Sammarco and the basses Marcel Journet, Édouard de Reszke and Pol Plançon. Throughout his life he acknowledged the "bel canto" example of Battistini.