This is one I’ve been holding for a couple of days because I am lazy and shiftless: James Bowman. countertenor.
When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.
“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”
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“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”
He was invited to audition.
“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”
Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.
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Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”
His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.
“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”
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Al Jaffee has passed at 102. THR. Tribute from Mad.
For those who don’t know, he was one of the great old-time “Mad Magazine” guys, perhaps most famous as the creator of the “fold-in” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.
Myriam Ullens. Noted here because this is an odd story.
She was a single mom and successful pastry chef when she went looking for investors to expand her business. One of the people she went to seek investment from was the billionaire Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnal (who apparently prefers “Ullens” as the short form).
They fell in love and married. The two of them got out of the business world and into philanthropy, founding (among other ventures) the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
According to reports, Ms. Ullens and her husband were shot by her stepson while sitting in their car. Her husband was wounded in the leg.
For the record: NYT obit for Michael Lerner.
Elizabeth Hubbard, actress. She doesn’t have that many screen credits beyond the two soaps (“As the World Turns” and “The Doctors”) she was in, but she also did a fair amount of work on Broadway.
I have to sheepishly admit that I never heard of Mr. Bowman, but he is the kind of musician, in this case his instrument was his voice, that I simply admire and hope that while I was active, I emulated.
A sort of self effacing, non egotistical, but somewhat ground breaking for what he did type. And always seeking to help out anyone who wanted to attempt to follow in his footsteps.
I have said before that I played saxophone in a rock band, but unlike most people who did that, I didn’t limit myself to just leads, but also substituted as a keyboard, with the sax, or as a percussionist, or even as a second guitar. All while just playing the saxes that I had. At times, I did cheat and pick up the acoustic guitar, but mostly just the sax. I think that was what made our group unique and kept us booked months in advance. Plus our vocal harmonies, with 2 female sisters and one male singer, who were all great together.
There were a few sax players in the area who played but mostly they just played solos, and a couple of them came and listened to what I was doing, and asked about how I chose to fill dead sound, etc. I also worked with a young man in high school who was planning on going to college for music. I was able to help him learn the things that I learned on my own that I never learned in school.
I don’t play any longer, but my love for music has never left. Now that we have the technology to listen to just about anything we want, a whole new world is opened up to us. This is the best time to live for music lovers.
I was unfamiliar with Mr. Bowman as well.
But Mike the Musicologist is a big Britten fan, so I led with that for him.