JON VICKERS
In the musical world people often use the word “monster” to describe an exceptional talent. Tenor Jon Vickers was just such a monster. Yet in a recent interview with the New York Times he summed up his career with these words: “I was just a singer. I did my best. Now its over.” Just a singer? The critic Andrew Porter isn’t alone in his assessment of Vickers as “the most exciting tenor of the second half of the 20th century.” Over? With more and more recorded performances like this one appearing on CD, Vicker’s legacy is assured. Jonathan Stewart Vickers was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan on the 29th of October, 1926. His family was devout, musical and poor. His father was a teacher, bandleader and a lay minister. Vickers was the youngest of eight children. Until he was 23 Vickers had never seriously considered making a profession of singing, although he had sung and performed from the time he was a child. He started out in retail: first at Safeway stores, then for Woolworth’s in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. He finally settled in Winnipeg and became a purchasing agent for the Hudson’s Bay Company. But all this time he kept on singing. In 1949 he was the tenor lead in a Winnipeg production of Naughty Marietta, opposite the Toronto soprano Mary Morrison. She encouraged Vickers to study formally and persuaded him to apply to the Royal Conservatory of Music. In 1950 Vickers came to Toronto on scholarship to study with George Lambert. In his first year in Toronto, Vickers sang in over 30 oratorio performances, performed the tenor lead in the Canadian Premiere of Bruckner’s Te Deum and attracted the attention of Sir Ernest MacMillan, for whom he performed Handel’s Messiah with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. For six years Vickers was Toronto’s leading tenor. He was a finalist on CBC Radio’s “Singing Stars of Tomorrow” and the first-prize winner of Radio-Canada’s “Nos Futures Étoiles”. He sang roles in over 25 productions for the Canadian Opera Company and the CBC Opera Company. Yet for some reason, Toronto’s critical establishment gave him a rocky ride. So much so that Vickers said that Toronto had “torn his heart out.” For a time, he refused to perform there. In 1956 Vickers successfully auditioned for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he debuted as Riccardo in Verdi’s The Masked Ball. Critics praised him for his performances in Samson, Carmen, Don Carlo, Aida and The Trojans. In 1958 he made a sensational debut in the role of Siegmund for the Bayreuth production of Die Walküre, and in the same year he sang Jason to Maria Callas’ Medea in Dallas. By 1960 he was freelancing in Vienna, San Francisco and at the Metropolitan Opera. He was soon recognized as the definitive interpreter of Tristan, Otello and Peter Grimes. Vickers’ voice was heroic, craggy, noble, often breathtaking. He had a huge dynamic range and a searing dramatic intensity His personality was equally formidable: driven and unflinching, he was incapable of artistic compromise. He felt he was serving a higher purpose. “I am humble before the gift that was given me,” Vickers said recently. “I have a great sense of gratitude to the giver of that gift.” The recital on this disc represents Vickers at the peak of his mature powers, in recital with his longtime accompanist and vocal coach, Richard Woitach. The location is the Student Union Theatre of the University of Alberta in Edmonton; the concert, part of the1974 CBC Alberta Festival of Music.

RICHARD WOITACH
Richard Woitach is a respected pianist, conductor and vocal coach. He graduated from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he studied piano with Orazio Frugoni. Woitach joined the Metropolitan Opera as a rehearsal pianist in 1959. He became one of its staff conductors and an associate conductor under James Levine. He has also conducted the San Francisco Opera, the London Symphony and the Guatemala Festival. Woitach has served as an accompanist for Sherrill Milnes, Teresa Stratas and Regina Resnik, among many others. He first worked with Jon Vickers in the early sixties and from 1967 onward he and the tenor toured and concertized together widely.

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660 - 1725)
Four Songs
Alessandro Scarlatti was a court composer and conductor in Naples and Rome at the end of the 17^th century and the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera. His prolific output, largely vocal, consists of 115 operas, 500 cantatas and over 200 masses. He was the father of the famous composer and harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti and was one of the most important influences on the young George Frederick Handel.

Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695)
Four Songs from Orpheus Britannicus
Realized by Benjamin Britten and edited by Peter Pears

Britten and Pears approached these songs with a sense of mission: to save them from obscurity and to make them appeal to the modern ear. What’s more, they felt that all existing arrangements lacked “Purcellian spirit”. Britten rejects the purist’s approach - his aim is not to be historically definitive but to get at the essence of Purcell’s style. He argues that every player in Purcell’s day would have realized the figured bass of his compositions in a highly personal way, and proceeds to do the same, but all in the right spirit. “In this edition the basses have also, inevitably, been realized in a personal way,” he writes in the introduction to the score, “but it has been the constant endeavour of the arranger to apply to these realizations something of that mixture of clarity, brilliance, tenderness and strangeness which shines out in Purcell’s music.”

George Frederick Handel (1685 - 1759)
Samson - two recitatives and the aria, Total Eclipse
Samson was the second of Handel’s oratorios on a text of Milton - in this case, his Samson Agonistes, loosely based on the 16th chapter of the Book of Judges. The ink was barely dry on the score of Messiah when Handel began work on Samson. He began composing at the end of September 1741 and had the first version completed within a month. He later returned to Samson, rearranged and expanded the work and premiered it at London’s Covent Garden Theatre in February of 1743. The story is familiar: The Israelites are suffering under the domination of the Philistines. Their superhuman saviour, Samson, has been betrayed by the Philistine Dalila, and has been blinded and enslaved. The action takes place in Gaza while the Philistines are holding a festival in honour of their god, Dagon. Lacerating himself with self-reproach, Samson laments his loss of sight.

Ludwig van Beeethoven (1770 - 1827)
An die ferne Geliebte, Op.98 - A song cycle by Alois Jeitteles
Beethoven’s song cycle was composed in 1816, around the time of the Op.102 cello sonatas and the Piano Sonata Op.101. Based on a cycle of poems by the otherwise forgotten Alois Jeitteles, Beethoven’s work reflected their literary form in music, creating the first true song cycle. What’s more he connected each song with either a piano or vocal bridge, forming an unbroken whole. Each song has a simple, folk-like melody that undergoes subtle variations from stanza to stanza.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958)
Vaughan Williams believed that serious music should have a national voice and be universally accessible. Much like the Hungarians, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, he collected his country’s folk melodies and their influence was reflected in his music. Still, Vaughan Williams had found his own voice as early as 1901 with Linden Lea, which remains his most popular song. Bright is the Ring of Words is one of the 10 lyrical songs of the cycle, Songs of Travel, set to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and composed between 1902 and 1907. Hugh’s Song of the Road is taken from Vaughan Williams’ folkopera, Hugh the Drover, composed between 1910 and 1914. Vickers emphasizes the song’s jauntiness, “kind of like John Wayne singing a love ballad.”

Traditional
Three Irish Folk Songs, arr: Herbert Hughs (1882 - 1937)
The Irish critic and composer Herbert Hughs published his three-volume collection, Old Irish Melodies, in 1909, plumbing a vocal tradition more ancient than England’s and making it available outside Ireland for the first time in the modern era. The realizations were his own and in many cases he found texts to replace the long-lost original Gaelic. He was one of the founders of the Irish Folksong Society and was for many years music critic of the Daily Telegraph.

Antonin Dvoˇrák (1841 - 1904)
Five songs from Gypsy Melodies, Op. 55
Like Vaughan Williams and Britten, Dvoˇrák responded to a perceived need for a national music and many of his earlier songs were based on folk poems. The Gypsy songs, composed in January of 1880, are among Dvoˇrák’s finest, deriving their carefree, outdoors feel from the folk-based lyrics of Heyduk. My Song Resounds evokes a dance, with the voice and piano in perfect balance. Silent Woods bears echoes of Brahms in its lyricism, while the melody of Songs My Mother Taught Me became his most beloved composition and has been transcribed for every imaginable instrumental combination.