Robert Radford

Robert Radford (13 May 1874, Nottingham – 3 March 1933, London) was a British bass singer who made his career entirely in the United Kingdom, participating in concerts and becoming one of the foremost performers of oratorios and other sacred music. He had equally great success in a broad spectrum of operatic roles, ranging from Wagner to Gilbert and Sullivan, due to the strength and burnished beauty of his well-trained voice.

Even as a young man, Radford possessed a deep and resonant voice. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, mainly under the conductor Alberto Randegger, but also received lessons from Battison Haynes and Frederic King. He had natural dramatic gifts which from the outset suggested an operatic career, but his early professional life was devoted particularly to oratorio and the concert platform.

His debut was at the Norwich Music Festival in 1899. He appeared for Henry J. Wood at a Queen's Hall prom on 9 February 1900 in Arthur Sullivan's The Martyr of Antioch. He was also a soloist at Wood's Trafalgar Day Centenary Concert of 21 October 1905 (at which Wood's Fantasia on British Sea-Songs was first performed). In 1906 he became the principal bass soloist in the Handel Festival (The Crystal Palace) concerts, and remained so until the 1920s.

On 26 May 1911, he took part in the Sheffield Festival Chorus performance of J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor for the London Music Festival, with Agnes Nicholls, Edna Thornton, Ben Davies and others; on the following day he was with Gervase Elwes and others in the big Leeds Choral Union performance of the St Matthew Passion. He was also in the Leeds Chorus performance of the Mass in B minor, with Carrie Tubb, John Coates and others, in the 'Three B's' Festival' of April 1915, again at Queen's Hall, under Henri Verbrugghen with the London Symphony Orchestra.

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