Gillian Knight
[2] Knight joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1959, going on tour immediately in eight of the leading contralto roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory.
[3] The Times wrote, "Many good Savoyards have regretted Gilbert's unkind lampooning of the unattractive elderly female, stouter than she used to be, with a caricature of a face and so on; and we have observed with gratitude that Buttercup, Ruth, Lady Jane and their equivalents are acted this season by a pleasing and personable young lady.... Miss Gillian Knight's Buttercup is in itself an iconoclastic impersonation.
[6] Knight spent almost six years with the D'Oyly Carte, appearing in the roles of Little Buttercup, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance, Lady Jane in Patience, the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, Katisha in The Mikado, Dame Hannah in Ruddigore, Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard, and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers.
[10] The Times noted, "Gillian Knight has a formidable stage presence as Ragonde, and a superbly articulated contralto to match.
[19] She also performed at Covent Garden in Arabella;[20] The Bartered Bride;[21] The Cunning Little Vixen;[22] Eugene Onegin;[23] Falstaff;[24] The Fiery Angel;[25] The Golden Cockerel;[26] Iphigénie en Tauride;[27] Jenůfa;[28] Die Meistersinger;[29] Rigoletto;[30] the Ring cycle;[29] Der Rosenkavalier;[31] Semele;[29] La traviata;[32] Il trovatore;[8] Otello;[10] and Wozzeck.
[33] Among modern operas at Covent Garden, Knight appeared in Peter Maxwell Davies's Taverner;[34] Hans Werner Henze's We Come to the River;[10] Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice;[5] Michael Tippett's King Priam;[35] and Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf.
[39] In 1981, Knight played The Old Lady in Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and the following year she sang the title role in The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
In 1988 she appeared with the revived D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as Dame Carruthers in Yeomen and the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, in which the critic Arthur Jacobs said she sang and acted "with more richness and energy than ever".
Chicago radio host Bruce Duffie, interviewing Knight after seeing that production noted, "Gillian Knight is one of those great personalities who simply go about their business season after season, giving splendid renditions of various roles, and adding luster to their home companies while not going far afield very often and, thus, passing up the opportunity for real world-wide stardom".
[48] She was also Kate in a 1966 BBC radio broadcast of Pirates and was the voice of Dame Hannah in the 1967 Halas and Batchelor cartoon version of Ruddigore.
[8] Prominent among Knight's operatic recordings is Madama Butterfly (1978), in the role of Suzuki, opposite Renata Scotto and Plácido Domingo, conducted by Lorin Maazel for CBS/Sony.
[29] She also appears in a wide range of specialist recordings for the Reader's Digest, notably the Timeless Favourites series of 3-CD sets produced by Jay Productions between 1995 and 2000.
