Richard Suart
He appeared at his alma mater, the Royal Academy of Music, in a 1977 production of Menotti's The Consul, supervised by the composer, as John Sorel, alongside Lesley Garrett as the Secretary, conducted by Marcus Dods.
[6] Suart's early operatic roles were with the English Music Theatre Company and the Opera Factory, where he sang the Doctor in Birtwistle's Punch and Judy, and Satan, the Puppetmaster and Gaffer Pietro in Osborne's Hell's Angels.
[7] He appeared as Horimiya in the world premiere of Minoru Miki's An Actor's Revenge (based on the film of that name) by the English Music Theatre at the Old Vic in London in 1979.
[3] When he sang Leone in Handel's Tamerlano at the Bloomsbury Theatre with Orpheus Opera in 1982, he was judged "one of the evening’s star turns, and his sardonic asides leavened proceedings wonderfully".
[9] That year he also appeared in La vera costanza at St John's, Smith Square, in the first UK performance of the critical edition by Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon.
[14] In Mussorgsky's rarely staged opera The Marriage (1981), The Guardian noted, "It helped enormously that the central role of Podkolyosin was taken by a singer as skilled in comedy as Richard Suart, making him enough of a Wooster-like silly ass to be consistently funny without losing the essential Russian flavour.
[21] Another Rossini role, Bartolo in The Barber of Seville came with Charles Court Opera at Iford in 2017, where he "used decades of G&S experience to supply a comedic tour de force".
[24] For the 2018 revival of Jonathan Miller's production of La Boheme for ENO at the London Coliseum a reviewer wrote "Praise is also due to a singer who was not on stage: Richard Suart, who acted as diction coach".
[29][41] Of his 1998 performances in The Pirates of Penzance for D'Oyly Carte, The Guardian wrote, "Richard Suart, a natural successor to the great John Reed, patters astoundingly and is gleefully funny as Major-General Stanley.
He created an entertainment entitled As a Matter of Patter, consisting mostly of Gilbert and Sullivan songs and dialogue and his own anecdotes‚ which he has performed with his wife in the United Kingdom‚ South Africa and the Middle East.
[53] He played the title role in the first professional staging of Gilbert and Sullivan's Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old since the 1871 premiere, in a performing edition by Anthony Baker and Timothy Henty.
2 in C minor (1980); Eight Songs for a Mad King (1987 for Finnish TV and Channel 4); Leonard Bernstein's Candide as Junkman, Inquisitor, and King Hermann Augustus, with the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra (1989); Dad in Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek (DVD) filmed in 1990; the Black Minister in György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1992); Blunt in Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr (1992); Poet, Hymen in Henry Purcell's The Fairy-Queen (1992); Starveling in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1993); Barabashkin in Cheryomushki (1995); Bardolph in Gustav Holst's At the Boar's Head (1996); and Gob in Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Poisoned Kiss (2003).
For the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, he recorded the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers, the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and Jupiter in Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld (1994).
In 2004, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Sir Charles Mackerras, Suart recorded the Flanders and Swann number "Ill Wind" as a filler for a CD of the Mozart horn concertos, on one of which it is based.
