Geoffrey Shovelton
Geoffrey Richard Shovelton (27 April 1936 – 4 July 2016)[1] was an English singer, actor and illustrator best known for his performances in leading tenor roles with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1970s.
[1][2] He began a career in education, and for several years he was senior geography master at the Salvatorian College, a grammar school in Wealdstone, Middlesex, while pursuing post-graduate research at the University of London.
[5][2] While still teaching, Shovelton performed in amateur operatic productions and first played in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera in 1961 in The Pirates of Penzance.
[6] In 1964 and 1965 he received awards in singing competitions at 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands and Verviers in Belgium, and these helped him to decide to pursue a career in opera.
[3] Shovelton first sang professionally in oratorio, performing in such works as Handel's Messiah, Haydn's Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah, and Verdi's Requiem, finally becoming a full-time singer in 1971.
His roles included Roderigo in Verdi's Otello, Don Curzio in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, and Lysander in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
He played the Defendant in a special performance of Trial by Jury in 1978 at London's Middle Temple Hall to commemorate the Bar Musical Society's first hundred concerts.
He also sang with the London Operetta Ensemble, presenting concerts of opera and lighter music in seaside venues in southern England.
[2] For many summers beginning in 1985, he performed in the productions of the Savoy Operas at the Gawsworth Hall Open Air Festival in Cheshire,[5] In 1985, Shovelton met the American soprano and choreographer Deborah Clague (1949–2016) while singing together in La traviata at Il Boccalino, and the two married in England in 1993.
[6] Shovelton served, from 1990 until his death, as the Honorary President of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of New York, where he gave the Jay Newman memorial lecture in 2014.
[13] Shovelton died at the age of 80, at the Androscoggin Hospice in Auburn, Maine, only a month after his wife's death and the diagnosis of his brain tumour.
[15] Shovelton was a soloist in the concert video recording, "Gilbert & Sullivan Present their Greatest Hits," from Royal Albert Hall in 1983.
