Jonathan Stewart Vickers.
Born Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, 29 October 1926.
Died Bermuda, 10 July 2015.
Canadian tenor.
Over a twenty-five year period until his retirement in 1982, Jon Vickers held a unique position as a heroic tenor able to bring a remarkable dramatic intensity to his stage performances. He was a theatrical performer, and his appearances in concert were extremely rare. He worked at Covent Garden throughout his career, and also sang regularly at the New York Met, Salzburg and La Scala.
Sadly, he never sang on the operatic stage in Scotland and, perhaps not even on the concert platform here.
He was a brilliantly effective performer as Otello, Tristan, Siegmund, Parsifal, Florestan, Peter Grimes, Canio and Don José. Other Verdi roles included Gustavus, Radamès and Don Carlos - he was in the first cast of the historic Visconti-Giulini staging at Covent Garden in 1958. His French repertoire also included Aeneas and Samson. Other parts he played less often included Handel's Samson, Captain Vere, Laca and Hermann in The Queen of Spades. Jason in Cherubini's Medea was sung in Dallas opposite Callas. He always turned down requests to sing Siegfried, and famously withdrew from a production of Tannhäuser at Covent Garden in 1977, appearing instead in a revival of Otello.
His career span lies completely within that long period after Edinburgh's Empire Theatre closed, and before it was reborn as the superb Festival Theatre. The Festival therefore had no building in which he could be heard to advantage, and he was not the kind of artist who would compromise. Sadly, so far as we can discover, he never performed in Scotland, either in opera or orchestral concert.
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