Astra Desmond

Astra Desmond CBE (10 April 1893 – 16 August 1973) was a British contralto of the early and middle twentieth century.

Astra Desmond was born Gwendolyn Mary Thompson, in Torquay, England. She was educated at Notting Hill High School and Westfield College, where she was a classical scholar. She studied singing with Blanche Marchesi (as did her colleague Muriel Brunskill) and Louise Trenton, and in Berlin with Ernst Grezebach and Coenraad V. Bos.

Desmond's career was mostly in concert and recital, but she made some operatic appearances. A 1916 review of the Carl Rosa Opera Company described her as a new singer of great promise. At Sadler's Wells she sang Delilah and Carmen and at Covent Garden, Ortrud, and Fricka.

In recital, Desmond was noted for her performances of songs by Edvard Grieg about which she wrote a 25-page article in Music and Letters in 1941, reprinted in Grieg. A Symposium, ed. Gerald Abraham. She also made a number of singing translations of Grieg's songs, published by Augener. For her work in this field she was awarded the Order of St. Olav by the Norwegian government. Her interpretation of Jean Sibelius's songs was also admired.

On 5 October 1938 Desmond was one of the original 16 singers in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, the recording of which, made at EMI's Abbey Road studio shortly thereafter, has been transferred to compact disc by several companies. Earlier, in 1932, Vaughan Williams had dedicated to her his Magnificat (for contralto solo, women's choir, solo flute and orchestra. (Later, she received the contrasting tribute of having a variety of rose named after her.)

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