Roy Henderson (baritone)
Born in Edinburgh and raised in Nottingham, Henderson began singing in public during the First World War, entertaining his army colleagues.
Among his many pupils the best-known was Kathleen Ferrier, and others included Jennifer Vyvyan (soprano), Constance Shacklock (mezzo-soprano), Norma Procter (contralto), Thomas Round (tenor) and John Shirley-Quirk and Derek Hammond-Stroud (baritones).
[2] Henderson attended Nottingham High School, where he received a classical education and became captain of the cricket team.
Henderson joined an army concert party entertaining the troops, and he began learning the knack of what he called "putting it over" to an audience.
[5] According to his colleague Keith Falkner, it was then that Henderson learned to sing in public, "practising what was to become a flexible and immaculate voice during late-night sentry duty".
[6] Before he returned to civilian life he auditioned for a well-known bass-baritone, Robert Radford, who recommended a career as a singer: "He told me the raw material was there, and the rest depended on myself".
[9] Senior students could be appointed sub-professors − assistants to faculty members − and while serving in that capacity Henderson decided in 1923 that when he reached the age of fifty he would retire from singing and devote himself to teaching.
[17] He was one of the sixteen soloists chosen for the Serenade to Music (1938), which Vaughan Williams composed as a tribute to Wood for the latter's golden jubilee as a conductor.
[20] Henderson was greatly admired in Elgar's The Apostles, In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Alan Blyth quotes a review from The Times: The Times called Henderson's performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah "unforgettable in its dramatic eloquence" and praised the nobility of his Jesus in Bach's St Matthew Passion.
[23] In the following Covent Garden season he appeared again in Das Rheingold and sang the Herald in Lohengrin, conducted respectively by Bruno Walter and Robert Heger.
In 1931 he was the baritone soloist in a concert performance of Manuel de Falla's opera Master Peter's Puppet Show, conducted by the composer.
In 1934 he sang Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro on the opening night of the festival's inaugural season and at twelve further performances in 1934 and 1935.
[3] His pupils at the RAM and elsewhere included the sopranos Jennifer Vyvyan, Rae Woodland, Pauline Tinsley and Marie Hayward, the mezzo-sopranos Constance Shacklock and Gillian Knight, the contraltos Kathleen Ferrier and Norma Procter, the tenor Thomas Round, the baritones John Shirley-Quirk and Derek Hammond-Stroud, and the bass Hervey Alan.
[4][13][5] After Ferrier's early death, Henderson contributed a chapter on being her teacher and friend in a memorial volume edited by Neville Cardus in 1954.
He contributed reminiscences and comment to many BBC radio programmes in his retirement, including one in 1989 in which he and the two other surviving soloists[n 2] discussed the origins and premiere of the Serenade to Music half a century earlier, and another in 1991 in which he and Falkner were in conversation with Richard Baker about their long careers.
[4] Henderson died at the Musicians' Benevolent Fund nursing home, Ivor Newton House, Bromley, south-east London, on 16 March 2000, aged 100.
