Kenneth Woollam
ENO tenor who also coached actors including Lenny Henry
KENNETH WOOLLAM, who has died aged 83, was for a dozen years principal tenor of English National Opera; in 1972, when it was still Sadler’s Wells Opera, he had made his debut with the company as the perfect embodiment of
Pierre in the British stage premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
A gentle giant of a man, he went on to have a key role in Charles Mackerras’s series of Janacek operas at ENO, playing a rather bookish Grigorievitch in Katya Kabanova in 1974 and a personable young gambler, Albert Gregor, in The Makropulos Case in 1975.
He also took part in some significant premieres outside ENO, including John Tavener’s A Gentle Spirit, based on a short story by Dostoevsky, commissioned for the 1977 Bath Festival.
Woollam had a powerful voice, with a firm, grainy tone that in oratorio could hold an audience spellbound. In the opera house he produced some heroic singing in roles such as Radames in Aïda, Calaf in Turandot and Herod in Salome, a part that he brought to the Edinburgh Festival in 1989.
Later he found a niche coaching actors including Lenny Henry, Elaine Paige, and Glenn Close, who had landed the role of a Swedish prima donna in Istvan Szabo’s film Meeting Venus (1991) and needed singing lessons, even though in the film her words would be sung by Kiri te Kanawa. “She’s a soprano – quite a good one, too,” Woollam said. “I don’t say that she could have made a successful opera singer, but it’s a very above-average sound.”
Niels Arestrup, a Francodanish actor who played a conductor in the same film, was tone deaf. “Poor Niels had so many problems, what with having to learn Hungarian and English and how to conduct,” said Woollam. In one crucial scene he gave up and voiced Arestrup’s lines himself.
Kenneth Geoffrey Woollam was born in Chester on January 16 1937 and was head chorister at Chester Cathedral choir school. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was a member of Glyndebourne
Festival Chorus and joined the BBC Singers in 1964. His early operatic appearances included the premiere of Nicholas Maw’s opera One Man Show at Camden Town Hall in 1967 in which the future conductor Roger Norrington also appeared.
Having made a successful debut with ENO he was appointed principal tenor in 1974. He returned to War and Peace in 1983 and the following year took part in the company’s North American tour.
Among his many Wagnerian appearances was one in 1983 in the title role in the composer’s opera Rienzi, the work’s first professional revival in Britain for 70 years. Although his silver hair gave the dictator Rienzi a benign quality not quite in keeping with a political man of violence, his singing was of compelling quality.
In an emergency Woollam could be relied upon to come to the rescue. In 1985 Opera North’s staging of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was threatened when the tenor Denes Striny, who had sung Walther on the opening night, lost his voice at the next performance. Woollam sang the role from a music stand at one side of the stage while Striny mimed the part. However, his sole appearance at Covent Garden was as a strong and rounded Aegisthus in Strauss’s Elektra in 1988.
Scaling back his stage appearances, in 1985 he was appointed Professor of Singing at the Royal College of Music. He also coached nervous curates at his parish church, St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park.
In 1965 Woollam married Phoebe Scrivenor, a music teacher. She survives him with their four daughters.
Kenneth Woollam, born January 16 1937, died April 15 2020