Glenda Raymond - Buywell

AUSTRALIAN HERITAGE is a sub-label of ABC Classics devoted
to recordings of historic value made by artists whose musical
legacies are a lasting influence on Australian culture.
472 689-2
AUSTRALIAN
HERITAGE
Glenda Raymond
SOPRANO
THE DEFINITIVE RECORDINGS
MOZART • PUCCINI • VERDI
ROSSINI • DONIZETTI
GOUNOD • LEONCAVALLO
OFFENBACH • THOMAS

Glenda Raymond soprano 1922-2003
GIOACHINO ROSSINI 1792-1868
The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia)
1 Cavatina: Una voce poco fa
(There’s a voice within my heart) (Act I) 4’12
2 Duet: Can it be? (Dunque io son) (Act I) 5’01
Geoffrey Chard baritone
3
JACQUES OFFENBACH 1819-1880
The Tales of Hoffmann (Les Contes d’Hoffmann)
Olympia’s Aria: Ev’ry grove with songbirds laden
(Les oiseaux dans la charmille) (Act I)
Westminster Singers
6’05
4 Barcarolle: Lovely night, O night of love
(Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) (Act II)
John Lanigan tenor
2’55
5 Antonia’s Aria: Thou art flown dove that I cherish
(Elle a fui, la tourterelle) (Act III)
GIACOMO PUCCINI 1858-1924
La bohème
2’08
6 Lovely maiden by moonlight (O soave fanciulla) (Act I)
John Lanigan tenor
3’25
7
AMBROISE THOMAS 1811-1896
Hamlet
Pâle et blonde (Pale and fair) (Act IV)
GIUSEPPE VERDI 1813-1901
Rigoletto
4’14
8 While at the altar praying (Tutte le feste) (Act II) 2’08
4
CHARLES GOUNOD 1818-1893
Faust
9 Final Trio: Now leave her! (Alerte, alerte) (Act V) 3’10
John Lanigan tenor; David Allen baritone
GAETANO DONIZETTI 1797-1848
The Daughter of the Regiment (La Fille du Régiment)
0 Amid sounds of battle … (Au bruit de la guerre …) (Act I) 6’37
David Allen baritone; Westminster Singers
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 1756-1791
Così fan tutte
! This portrait … (Ah guarda, sorella) (Act I) 3’20
Sylvia McPherson mezzo-soprano
CHARLES GOUNOD
Mireille
@ Valse-ariette: O légère hirondelle (O airy swallow) (Act I) 3’49
John Amadio solo flute
Romeo and Juliet (Roméo et Juliette)
£ Final duet: Where am I? (Où suis-je?) (Act V) 5’04
John Lanigan tenor
HEINRICH PROCH 1809-1878
$ Deh, torna mio bene (Ah, return my dearest)
(Air and Variations), Op. 164 5’01
5

FRIEDRICH VON FLOTOW 1812-1883
Martha
% The Last Rose of Summer (Letzte Rose) (Act II) 2’45
John Lanigan tenor
^
AMBROISE THOMAS
Mignon
I am Titania (Je suis Titania) (Act II)
RUGGIERO LEONCAVALLO 1857-1919
Pagliacci
4’12
& Nedda’s Aria: Hark! you beautiful songbirds
(Stridono lassù) (Act I)
ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796
2’35
* Comin thro’ the rye
Eunice Garland piano
2’20
PAOLO TOSTI 1846-1916
( Goodbye 4’31
6
Total Playing Time 73’46
Glenda Raymond soprano
The Australian Symphony Orchestra
Hector Crawford conductor
2, $, orchestra and conductor unknown
Glenda Raymond 1922-2003
A Stellar Talent
by John Cargher
In the mid-20th century Australians knew
more about opera than the English.
They were excessively proud of their
singers. The world’s most famous prima
donna, Nellie Melba, had been Australian
and thereafter every soprano, good, bad or
indifferent, became an instant celebrity,
while many an equally good tenor or
baritone happily basted in obscurity. The
fault lay largely with Melba herself. One
of her more admirable traits was the
encouragement she gave to young Australian
sopranos. As a consequence they all claimed
to have been discovered by, taught by or
ruined by Nellie. Whatever her failings as a
person, nobody denies Melba’s genuine
place as an artistic icon in the history of her
native country.
Few of the many sopranos who rightly
or wrongly claimed an association with
Melba achieved lasting fame. The few who
brought further credit to Australia – Marjorie
Lawrence, Florence Austral, Joan Hammond,
Marie Collier, to name but four – owed little
or nothing to their famous predecessor. Even
less so two sopranos who provided the
voices for Melba biographies: on film Patrice
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Munsel and on television Roslyn Dunbar.
(More recently the admirable Yvonne Kenny
sang for Melba in a second television series.)
The only real contender as an imitation
Melba is the subject of this CD, Glenda
Raymond, who provided the voice for a
radio biography of Melba covering no less
than 52 episodes in 1946 and another 26
a few years later. The series made her a
household name in Australia, but her stage
career was negligible through choice, not
lack of talent.
Raymond was discovered by a notable
pioneer of Australian radio and television,
Hector Crawford, who ought to be remembered
also for his immense contribution to
the arts. He had a remarkable record of major
achievements in so many different fields,
yet he was a modest man. Unsurprisingly,
his later marriage to his protégée Glenda
Raymond was not the subject of any publicity
campaign either. Raymond continued to
sing after marrying Crawford, but opportunities
in post-war Australia were limited.
While England also suffered a musical
recession after the end of the Second
World War, the voice of this new Australian
soprano found instant recognition in that
country when she arrived there in 1948.
Born in Melbourne on 26 October 1922,
Glenda Raymond was brought up by her

grandmother; her parents separated when
she was only two. Beyond the fact that her
mother and an uncle had good voices and
by all accounts sang Victorian ballads very
well, there was no attempt to encourage
young Glenda to take an interest in things
musical or artistic. She became a teller in a
bank and, like hundreds of other Australians
since Europeans settled the continent,
sang in church choirs in her spare time.
Anyone listening to the voice represented
on this CD will find it difficult to believe
that this well-placed brilliant soprano voice
had no basic training whatever prior to
blithely accepting the task of replicating
Melba’s voice in the 52 weekly radio hours
of The Melba Story.
Inevitably, under the guidance of Hector
Crawford, Raymond began to take singing
lessons, but it should be noted that she
went to the soprano Pauline Bindley only
after The Melba Story began. Without even
the most basic musical education, Raymond
was taught a huge variety of operatic arias
and, later, complete operas by Crawford
and Bindley. All were recorded under the
most primitive circumstances on 16-inch
copper transcription discs which allowed
no editing of any kind. Technical errors or
mistakes by either singers or actors resulted
in the re-recording of complete thirteen
8
minute segments of each individual program
before it was broadcast nationwide by the
commercial Melbourne radio station 3DB.
The Melba Story also went to air in 17 other
countries including New Zealand, Canada,
South Africa, Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore,
Jamaica and Trinidad!
The actual recording was made in two
unconnected sections of the Unitarian
Church in East Melbourne. The conductor,
Hector Crawford, the orchestra and the
singers were in the church itself and the
overseeing producer Dorothy Crawford
directed the actors and sound effect
technicians in the Church Hall. Both teams
were coordinated by flashing red lights and
what was produced in both venues went
simultaneously via landline to the 3DB
studios. It is almost miraculous that most of
these primitive discs have survived in
excellent condition and that the sound is
amazingly good, as this CD proves beyond
doubt. Compiling this tribute to the lost
voice of Glenda Raymond was not made
any easier by the fact that these huge discs
bore no notation at all of their content,
which had been listed carefully in a detailed
index. When Crawford Productions was
sold in 1988, the literally hundreds of discs
were passed on to the National Sound
Archives in Canberra, but all printed
information (the index) was shredded
beforehand!
Thanks must be given to ScreenSound
Australia, the successors to the Archives.
Facilities for playing 16-inch transcription
discs are not easy to find and the material
for this CD was collected from tapes,
cassettes and usually un-tracked CDs
which, due to the lack of any index, are as
difficult to research as the originals.
In retrospect, the mind boggles that a
practical businessman like Hector Crawford
went ahead with such a huge undertaking
featuring a 24-year-old without any
performing experience or vocal training.
In 1945 he and his sister Dorothy Crawford
started Crawford Productions, which provided
radio drama series to various radio stations
and networks. He had been trained as a
conductor by the coincidentally named
Melba Conservatorium of Music and had
worked professionally as a conductor. He
was also acquainted with Melba’s family
and heirs, the Armstrongs and Vesteys. It
seemed the most natural thing to create a
tribute to the great singer for radio and one
of Melba’s own protégées, Stella Power, was
an obvious choice to sing in the series on
behalf of her own mentor. She had been
promoted by the diva herself as ‘The Little
Melba’ and, like Crawford himself, was
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educated at the Melba Conservatorium.
The Crawford offices were in the
Broadcast Exchange’s studios in Melbourne’s
Flinders Lane. Its various facilities included
equipment to make recordings of voices
and young Glenda Raymond went there to
record a song as a present for her grandmother’s
birthday in 1945. Crawford
overheard her singing on an intercom. The
hardworking bank teller was telephoned by
him the next day and offered a contract at
£4-7-6 a week to sing hymns with massed
choirs and to provide the voice for the
young Melba only. It is hard to determine
why, or even whether, Stella Power was
dropped from the project, but Raymond
ended up providing the singing voice for
Melba from youth to retirement in all the
episodes, while the noted actress Patricia
Kennedy acted the diva. This highly
professional radio drama series was an instant
success and continued for a full year in 1946/7.
An additional 26 half hour episodes were
produced later, but in the meantime the
name Glenda Raymond became a major
attraction.
The immensely popular concerts in
Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, ‘Music for
the People’, were started by Hector Crawford
in 1938 and eight years later were as
popular as ever. Raymond became a regular

guest. The Vacuum (now Mobil) Oil
Company sponsored The Melba Story, which
was broadcast nationwide on Channel 9. Its
success was so great that it was followed by
a musically more varied series called Opera
for the People. This also starred Glenda
Raymond. With the tenor John Lanigan,
the baritone David Allen and various other
singers, the repertoire quickly expanded.
Crawford’s stable of singers was used in a
huge number of different radio series over
the years. No chronological record of these
commercial broadcasts has been found and
Glenda Raymond herself could not explain
how she fitted so many engagements in
Australia into the years 1946-1948.
Hector Crawford created the famous
Mobil Quest as a successful commercial
venture in 1949. It seems unlikely that any
other country in the world had a serious
singing competition on radio solely concerned
with ‘bringing to the attention of the public
the best vocal talent available in the
Commonwealth’, and requiring each
competitor to sing an operatic aria. The
second winner of the rich Mobil Quest
prize (in 1950) was Joan Sutherland. The
whole of Australia tuned in to the weekly
heats and the final made headlines far and
wide. Strangely enough, the rise in popularity
of fully produced opera as a medium in the
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1950s and 1960s caused a rise in prejudice
against this supposed ‘elitist’ art form, and
vocal competitions, which proliferate these
days, are today no longer considered a
universally acceptable form of simple
entertainment, as was the case in the late
1940s. With admittedly a smaller share of
attention, young singers today get a clearer
career path in Australia than in the past. In
post-World War II Australia serious singing
was a happenstance; fine voices abounded,
but their training and judging in competitions
like Mobil Quest was, to say the least,
not conducive to preserving young voices.
It is interesting to consider what
Glenda Raymond’s career might have been
if she herself had been a contestant for the
‘in-house’ Mobil Quest created by her
husband. Times were different then. There was
no sign of the larger voices now dominating
the international scene. Singers like Callas
and Sutherland had not yet appeared.
Amelita Galli-Curci and Toti dal Monte,
however beautiful their singing, had voices
too small for present day demands or
fashion. Similarly, the voice of Glenda
Raymond, no matter how good, might be
considered too small in our own time, but
it was right up there with the best in the
immediate post-war years and this CD
should prove this once and for all.
By 1948 this serious performer had a
pop-star-like following in Australia. The
only modern parallel to her case would be
the adoration of Pavarotti, but that was a
worldwide phenomenon, not restricted to
Australia. Clearly Raymond was not overpaid,
for her sole venture overseas was made
possible only through the proceeds of an
Australian concert tour in early 1948. That
an Australian soprano could head a bill of
unknown local singers to fill concert halls
Australia-wide is an indication of the oldtime
enthusiasm for serious singing created
by Melba earlier in the century.
Patronage of singers passed Glenda
Raymond by. She was a ‘commercial’ artist
and, therefore, presumed to be not in need
of financial support. She was much too
famous to take part in competitions and
prior to The Melba Story had not thought of
singing as a profession. She did have plenty
of admirers, however, and went overseas to
start an international career with three
introductions. Two were to good teachers:
Lina Pagliughi in Italy and Dino Borgioli in
London. There was also a letter to the
British conductor Basil Cameron.
When Glenda Raymond ‘stopped over’
in London – on her way to Italy – she
telephoned Cameron, who immediately
invited her to his home and thereby started
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a career in England for her almost
instantaneously. The London Philharmonic
Orchestra was auditioning singers for a
revival of Rutland Boughton’s, at that time,
immensely popular music drama, The
Immortal Hour. Cameron sat down there
and then, rehearsed the young Australian in
the principal aria, ‘How beautiful they are’,
and arranged an audition for 10am the
following morning. Raymond was offered
the leading role immediately, and even
before the first night, the LPO signed her to
a long-term contract to sing in its concerts
in London (including the Albert Hall) and
the provinces. The Immortal Hour, conducted
by the composer himself (wearing plus
fours, Raymond recalled) was staged at The
People’s Palace, an enormous modern theatre,
seating 3000, built in Mile End Road in the
East End of London in a vain attempt to
create another Sadler’s Wells. The Boughton
opera completed its season of several weeks
and, with Glenda Raymond, became the
LPO’s opening attraction for the Llangollen
International Festival in Wales in 1950.
There was no shortage of work in
England for Glenda Raymond in the years
1948 to 1950. Apart from her LPO concert
contract, she appeared with the BBC
Symphony Orchestra in events which
included Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy

and Handel’s Semele, both conducted by
Constant Lambert. There was also a big
demand for the young Australian from the
large English dance orchestras. Louis Levy,
Henry Hall and Sydney Torch featured her
on radio and television. As in Australia,
Raymond was a commercial property,
although her LPO contract ensured that she
was also accepted seriously as a classical
artist. In Australia she was still a pop idol,
even though she sang an extensive
repertoire of music for which ‘serious’
organisations, including the ABC, would
not consider engaging her. Hector Crawford
was taking a romantic interest in his new
leading lady by this stage and she was
actually given six months’ leave by the LPO
to enable her to return to Australia to star
in a 26-week series called simply Glenda –
produced by the Crawfords, of course.
When she returned a second time, it
was for the specific purpose of marrying
Hector Crawford in November 1950.
Almost immediately she was invited back to
England by Sir Thomas Beecham and (with
apparent glee) replied by telegram ‘Sorry,
can’t come.’ Her now husband wasted no
time in getting his wife back to work and
had no trouble convincing commercial
sponsors to jump on Glenda’s continuing
bandwagon, paying for a long list of radio
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series on specific subjects, each lasting 26
weeks. There was the inevitable sequel to
The Melba Story, The Amazing Oscar
Hammerstein, The Blue Danube (the story
of Johann Strauss) and much more.
Many famous singers say that they are
self-taught or have only casually attended
various teachers. None left recordings, no
matter how primitive, which can substantiate
their claims. Raymond is the exception
which proves the rule. There is little or no
difference between the untrained voice at
the start of the Melba series and the voice
which shone after tuition in England by Dino
Borgioli and years of practical experience.
Circumstances, and possibly a lack of
ambition, prevented her from having
renown outside the today almost obsolete
medium of live radio. Everything on this
CD was recorded live, if in a studio or
theatre. There were no re-takes, no editing.
Faults are minimal. Raymond did not have
the perfect pitch on every note which was
Melba’s greatest asset, but many recordings
by famous artists have made commercial
discs worse than these and Raymond’s
command of fioriture or coloratura is way
up there with the greatest in history. It must
be remembered that few arias were sung on
radio in original form. Abbreviations abound
and sound effects, like added applause, are
inclined to intrude into the endings of
tracks. They are a small price to pay for
singing of remarkable beauty and agility.
Glenda Raymond was a star of Australian
radio, not stage or film, let alone television.
Not only that, but she was a star of
commercial radio, not the Australian
Broadcasting Commission, as it was then,
which broadcast complete operas live during
Raymond’s early years. She contributed
immensely to the popularity of fine singing
in a continent without the European
background of opera as family entertainment.
In the early 1950s fully staged opera
seasons had only just begun to appear as a
local phenomenon in Australia. The two
companies proclaimed, first by Miss Gertrude
Johnson in Melbourne and, later, Mrs Clarice
Lorenz in Sydney as ‘National Operas’ were
floundering and the Elizabethan Theatre
Trust Opera Company (now Opera Australia)
did not take its first steps until 1957. The
Melbourne-born Glenda Raymond missed
out on the important National Theatre
productions of Miss Johnson, because
Glenda was a friend and pupil of Pauline
Bindley. Thirty years earlier Bindley and
Johnson had competed in the earliest
JC Williamson seasons. Twenty years earlier
they had been in direct opposition in
England, singing identical roles in the
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British National Opera (Johnson) and the
Carl Rosa Opera Company (Bindley). Glenda,
now Mrs Crawford, was persona non grata,
in company with Bindley and Mrs Lorenz,
as far as opera in Melbourne was concerned.
When Lorenz dared to bring her National
Opera of NSW to the Tivoli Theatre in
Melbourne in 1953 she quite possibly
produced a good case of one-upmanship by
hiring Raymond to sing Rosina in her
production of The Barber of Seville. It seems
unlikely that no suitable soprano could be
found in Sydney.
Once the Trust Opera Company was
formed, it was inevitable that Glenda
Raymond would be engaged sooner or
later. For whatever reason it turned out to
be later. The inevitable Barber of Seville
could hardly do without Glenda in 1958
and opera-goers could not have guessed
that her Almaviva, Donald Smith, would
one day shine in more important operas. In
1960 Glenda sang Gilda in Rigoletto and
the Queen of Night in The Magic Flute. In
love with the small role of Marzelline in
Beethoven’s Fidelio, she also managed to be
accepted for a few performances of that
when Sylvia Fisher returned to sing Leonore.
In 1970 she sang in The Secret Marriage by
Cimarosa for the amateur Victorian Opera
Company and a year later Despina in Così

fan tutte in the National Theatre’s last
professional opera season, as ‘The Melbourne
Opera‚’ at the Princess Theatre.
Finis a not so long career in opera.
Glenda was nearing 40 and had two children
and a most successful husband. She
continued to sing frequently in Graham
Kennedy’s classic In Melbourne Tonight on
Channel 9 while it still had regular serious
spots featuring such dancers as Kathleen
Gorham and Robert Pomié and the
Channel 9 Chorus, which included future
opera stars Gregory Dempsey and Clifford
Grant. Her private life was a full one: for
some years she was on the board of Crawford
Productions. Pop music and television
caused a drastic decline not only in radio
ratings. Glenda’s day had passed before the
music industry began to find a potential
audience for serious recordings by local
artists. One of the most prolific and most
versatile singers in the history of Australian
music-making was forgotten.
Worth noting:
The musical content of the CD may appear
haphazard. It is not. It would have been
easy to stick to coloratura showpieces of
great excellence. ‘Comin thro’ the rye’ and
Tosti’s ‘Goodbye’ are typical of the music
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sung and recorded by Melba. Three items
from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann were
chosen to show that as far back as 1947
Glenda Raymond sang the music of Olympia,
Giulietta and Antonia in sequence, admittedly
on radio, but well ahead of the day when
recordings began to be made with one
leading lady only.
Tracks 4, 7 and 12 come from the earliest
of The Melba Story episodes in 1946, track
2 from a complete live performance of The
Barber of Seville in Melbourne in 1953. It
is impossible to establish the exact dates of
most of the other tracks. Some may have
come into being at a later date still. Note
how little the quality of the voice varies.
The faintly smudged roulades and runs
in the early Hamlet aria (Track 7) quickly
improved after Raymond’s first lessons
with Pauline Bindley. Sung only a few
weeks later, the Mireille aria (Track 12)
shows how remarkably well-trained the
voice was even before Raymond studied
with Dino Borgioli in England. The
difference between 1946 and 1953 is
negligible. Raymond considered beauty of
voice more important than technique. Easy
to say for someone born with both.
Project concept, research & coordination
John Cargher
Executive Producers Robert Patterson, Lyle Chan
Editorial and Production Manager Hilary Shrubb
Compilation Producer John Cargher
Mastering Garry Havrillay
Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd
Photographs reprinted by kind permission.
Original sources provided by ScreenSound
Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive.
Proudly preserving the nation’s screen and
sound heritage.
This compilation � 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
© 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Distributed in Australasia by Universal Classics & Jazz,
a division of Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence.
Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved.
Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or
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