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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 such luminaries as Elvis Presley and the great 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 to immigrant Scottish parents, Thomas Dawson, an ironworker, plumber and seaman from Kirkcaldy and Alison, née Miller, in Adelaide, South Australia. The youngest of nine children, he attended East Adelaide Primary School, then Pulteney Street Grammar 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. In addition to Italian and French opera, he grew to admire the German music dramas of Richard Wagner. On 20 May 1905, he married Annie Mortimer "Nan" Noble, daughter of the box-office manager of the Alhambra Theatre, who sang professionally in the soprano range under the name Annette George.〔 Around this time, a Russian medical specialist assisted him to extend his upper range, until his compass extended from E-flat in the bass to a high A or A-flat. In 1909, he appeared at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as the Night Watchman in ''The Mastersingers of Nuremberg'' (opposite tenor Walter Hyde as David), with Hans Richter conducting. During one of these performances, after winning a large amount playing poker in the wings, he hurried on at his call, and accidentally scattered his winnings over the stage. (Dawson, who had a lively sense of humour, was a master at recounting such anecdotes, usually about other performers.) However, he did not find the pressures of the opera stage to be a congenial fit with his easygoing personality, and he elected instead to forge an alternative career as a concert and oratorio singer. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peter Dawson (bass-baritone)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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