Audio File
John Wilson
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2019

Trefor Davies remembers working with Sumner Austin on the opera productions at the Northern School of Music.

Trefor: It was a great experience really. We had a… the one that used to produce, it was a man called Sumner Austin, who was a very famous baritone in his day, for Carl Rosa, I think it was, and Sadler’s Wells, so he used to come up on a Thursday and he was how old then? I think he was well in his 70s and he would be all day there, from I think half-past ten start. All day, all afternoon and evening. Anybody that wanted to try out any arias, he would come and direct you. And even when… I think I can remember I’m sure he said… there’s about three years afterwards he was 80, so he must have been about 77, and he was still on his feet, I mean. I thought, ‘where do you get the stamina from for that’? But he had, wonderful. And again he was… we used to do… one of the thing he got us to do was to sing anything in recitative. So you had to make up a story, start off making up a story and somebody would start it off that end of the row, bit like Chinese Whispers, so by the time you got it there was a bit of a story going on, so you had to add to it and John would play us a chord so that we… *sings*… one of those. And it was great because you really had to concentrate on getting those words out in absolutely pristine condition, so that everyone could understand it, and he would say ‘I didn’t hear that’ or something like that, whoever it was that was getting it and I get on very well with him.

Part of the #NSM2020 project "A 20/20 Legacy: the centenary of the Northern School of Music" supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.