Wilson’s connection with the Festival began in 1920, when he conducted the Steep Choir, and he made his debut as a soloist three years later in Sir Hubert Parry’s Oratorio Job. He appeared almost annually until 1933, when a rift with the conductor, Sir Adrian Boult, who married Wilson’s divorced wife and became father to his children, caused him to leave. After he retired from singing he became Head of Music at the BBC, where ironically he oversaw Boult’s enforced retirement in 1950. In addition he became deputy general administrator of the Royal Opera House and Music Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He could be arrogant and difficult, yet quickly became a member of the Establishment and was knighted in 1948. After his retirement he returned to Petersfield, where he lived in Reservoir Lane until his death in 1966, in the house now occupied by the Festival Chairman.

Wilfred Brown was born to a Quaker family in 1922, and spent the war years in the Quaker-run Friends Relief Service. He taught modern languages and singing at Bedales from 1949 to 1952, the year in which he decided to become a full-time singer. He first appeared at the Festival in 1951, and the following year sang opposite the famous soprano Isobel Baillie, with whom Wilson had sung twenty years before. He returned regularly until 1970, the year before he died.

Though there can be few alive today who heard Steuart Wilson in the flesh, his voice cannot have been very different from Brown’s, which remains familiar to many of us. Their repertoire was similar, and at the Festival they were both heard in Bach’s Cantatas, the B minor Mass, Haydn’s Creation and Purcell’s King Arthur. Wilson was an enthusiastic promoter of Bach’s music in the 1920s, to the extent that he even re-wrote the words of one of his cantatas to suit the occasion, which would never do today! He also sang in the famous live broadcast from the Petersfield Drill Hall of Bach’s Magnificat in 1930, and like Brown thirty years later, was a leading Evangelist of his day.

Both singers specialised in Elizabethan music, Wilson with his own ensemble, the English Singers, who toured Europe and America in the early 1920s, and Brown as a member of the even more famous Deller Consort. They both had quintessentially English voices, though the older singer’s must have been somewhat larger, enabling him to sing Gerontius with the composer at the Royal Albert Hall and at the Three Choirs Festival. To judge from records Brown’s tone was certainly the sweeter, and his linguistic skills enabled him to excel, not only in English song, but in French chansons and German Lieder. He gave many recitals at home and abroad with the guitarist John Williams, and perhaps his best-known recording is Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis, in which his incomparable delivery of the English text has never been equalled.

It is a work he performed many times with Kathleen Merritt in the early days of the Southern Orchestral Concert Society and sang in his final concert at Highclere Castle in 1970, when already mortally ill. But my abiding memory of him is in a performance of Handel’s Samson at Chichester. It is not a role that ideally suited his lyrical voice, yet he was so deeply involved in the part, and sang with such conviction, that his performance left us all stunned. Many will never have heard of Wilfred Brown, but may remember a solo voice singing hymns day after day on the old Light Programme’s Five to Ten, immediately after Housewives’ Choice. That was the voice of Bill Brown, who lived in Station Road with his wife Mollie and their six children, and it encapsulated his sincerity, his gentleness, and indeed his goodness. It is a pleasure to salute these two great artists of Petersfield’s musical past, so similar, yet so utterly different.

Tom Muckley, March 2003

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

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