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Anthony Rolfe Johnson performed at the Met in 1994. (Sara Krulwich/Ny Times) |
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, 69; farmer became star tenor
NEW YORK — Anthony Rolfe Johnson, an Englishman who began his professional life as a farmer and ended it as a distinguished lyric tenor who had performed to glowing notices in the world’s most storied opera houses and concert halls, died July 21 in London. He was 69.
Mr. Rolfe Johnson had been ill with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years.
Mr. Rolfe Johnson, who did not begin formal training until he was nearly 30, sang leading roles on opera stages including those at Covent Garden in London, the Paris Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera, where he appeared 20 times in the 1990s.
He recorded widely and was a soloist with major orchestras, including the Chicago and Boston symphonies and the New York Philharmonic.
Critics praised his tonal beauty, vocal flexibility, and interpretive sensitivity, as well as his ability to inhabit seemingly any period in a 400-year swath of musical literature. Though Mr. Rolfe Johnson was most closely identified with early-music composers, including Monteverdi, Bach, and Handel, his portfolio ranged through Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and on to modernity.
In 20th-century music, he was especially renowned for his Peter Grimes, the tortured fisherman at the heart of Benjamin Britten’s opera of that name.
Anthony Rolfe Johnson was born in the Oxfordshire village of Tackley; as a boy he sang in his church choir. By the time he was a teenager, however, he had decided to study agriculture and spent most of his 20s farming in Sussex.
In his late 20s, seeking a hobby, he joined a local choir. On hearing him, a fellow chorister sent him to sing before a prominent voice teacher in London. There — and, by all accounts, to his immense astonishment — Mr. Rolfe Johnson was told that properly trained, he stood to become a world-class singer.
Mr. Rolfe Johnson made his operatic debut in 1973 with the English Opera Group, singing Count Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky’s opera “Iolanta.’’ Other notable roles over the years included Aschenbach, the lead in Britten’s “Death in Venice,’’ which he sang at the Met in 1994.
He had made his Met debut three years earlier in the title role of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,’’ substituting for Luciano Pavarotti, who had withdrawn because of a schedule conflict.
In 1992, he was made a Commander of the British Empire.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
