John Cameron (baritone)

Over the next 25 years Cameron pursued a career, in both Britain and Australia, in which concert work and recordings played as great a part as opera.

He studied at the New South Wales State Conservatorium in Sydney,[1] and by the late 1940s he was performing in the concert hall, and in opera, including Il trovatore in 1947.

[3] In 1948 after a nationwide singing competition Cameron and a fellow prize-winner, Joan Sutherland, sang under the baton of Eugene Goossens at a concert in Sydney.

[6] He played minor parts for the company in Lohengrin, Tosca, Carmen and Parsifal, and created roles in the premieres of The Pilgrim's Progress and Billy Budd.

[7][n 1] After the end of his three-year contract with Covent Garden, Cameron was engaged by the Glyndebourne Festival to sing Arbace in Mozart's Idomeneo and in two roles in Gluck's Alceste.

[8] During the Mozart bicentenary year of 1956 he sang Figaro, Papageno in The Magic Flute and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte for the productions in Sydney, in a company headed by Sena Jurinac and Sesto Bruscantini.

Between 1957 and 1974 he appeared in A Tale of Two Cities (Arthur Benjamin, 1957), The Prisoner (Luigi Dallapiccola, 1959), Diary of a Madman (Humphrey Searle, 1960), The Sorrows of Orpheus (Darius Milhaud, 1960), Punch and Judy (Harrison Birtwistle, 1968), Cardillac (Paul Hindemith, 1970), The Trial (Gottfried von Einem, 1973) and Arden Must Die (Alexander Goehr, 1974).