Richard Van Allan, who has died of cancer aged 73, had a remarkable career in opera, spanning more than 40 years. A bass-baritone with a sonorous voice, he had a commanding stage presence that proved many times the adage that there are no small roles - even when he appeared in supporting parts, his ability to invest them with an individual personality was always memorable.
Born in Clipstone, Nottinghamshire, Van Allan grew up in Derbyshire, where his first musical experiences were as a chorister at the local church in Bolsover, and then in Gilbert and Sullivan productions at Brunts grammar school in Mansfield. His first major role, a tenor part before his voice had broken, was Nanki-Poo in The Mikado. (Decades later, his Pooh-Bah in Jonathan Miller’s production became one of his favourite parts at the English National Opera.)
On leaving school he joined the police cadets, and during his national service, stationed in Germany, he joined the Military Police. It was while in Germany that his love of music really took hold of him, and after a spell as a police constable back in England, he decided to take a teacher’s training course. At Worcester Training College his latent abilities were spotted by the Handel scholar Watkins Shaw. Soon Van Allan was singing in concerts and more amateur G&S productions, and after an audition with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, he was encouraged to study with David Franklin at the Birmingham School of Music, while teaching science. Franklin arranged an audition with the Glyndebourne Chorus, and Van Allan made his professional stage debut at the Sussex opera house in 1964.
He returned each year, and although he taught for a while, singing took over, first in the chorus at Sadler’s Wells, then with his first major role, as Osmano in Cavalli’s L’Ormindo at Glyndebourne in 1967. Two years later he took over the title role in Don Giovanni during the first Sadler’s Wells season at the London Coliseum. This was in the controversial production designed by Derek Jarman, and Van Allan’s youthful figure in black leather trousers, and his “beaky, saturnine” presence made for his first success. The same season he sang Leporello in the same work, and for the next 20 years, he would continue to alternate these roles, occasionally taking the smaller role of Masetto.
Van Allan’s Covent Garden debut was in 1971, as the Mandarin in Puccini’s Turandot. The summer before he had created the “apoplectic” role of Colonel Lord Francis Jowler in Nicholas Maw’s The Rising of the Moon at Glyndebourne, when Harold Rosenthal wrote, “do I detect a new British Baron Ochs?” The satyr of Der Rosenkavalier did indeed become one of Van Allan’s favourite parts: he first sang it at San Diego in 1976, when Martin Bernheimer wrote, “Vocally he proved a phenomenon, a true black bass who really could approach Strauss’s wide-ranging lines of music.” As with his Don Giovanni, Van Allan never lost sight of the fact that Ochs was an aristocrat: the role became much more complex just because of the degree of subtlety he brought to it, rather than some of the more conventional hamming and slapstick that can sometimes disfigure the part.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s he appeared regularly at Covent Garden and the Coliseum. He played small parts, Angelotti in Tosca, Dr Grenvil in La Traviata, on the occasion of Montserrat Caballé’s Covent Garden debut, a terrifying Bonze in Madama Butterfly, a superbly sardonic Zuniga in Carmen, conducted by Solti, and the Old Man in Tippett’s King Priam, while graduating to major roles, including Figaro, Don Alfonso in Così Fan Tutte, and a “seedy, obstreperous” Leporello again, in John Copley’s production of Don Giovanni, with Cesare Siepi in the title role. At the English National Opera he sang the Grand Inquisitor in the first production of Verdi’s Don Carlos to use the newly discovered passages that the composer had excised. This role stayed with him for many years, and he later alternated as King Philip II. His other Verdi roles included Zaccariah in Nabucco, which he first sang with Welsh National Opera in 1969, Silva in Ernani also for WNO, in 1979, Procida in I Vespri Siciliani, at ENO in 1984 and Padre Guardiano in La Forza del Destino.
At the English National Opera he took part in many of the productions during the so-called “power house” years, including David Alden’s notorious Tchaikovsky Mazeppa with its chainsaws and torture chambers, David Pountney’s production of Dvorak’s Rusalka, the Father in Charpentier’s Louise, very often as Basilio in The Barber of Seville, Mephistofeles in both Gounod’s and Berlioz’s accounts of the Faust legend, Count des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon (the role of his belated Metropolitan Opera debut in 1987) and three contrasting parts in works by Benjamin Britten. In Gloriana, he was an enigmatic Sir Walter Raleigh; in Graham Vick’s Noh-inspired production of The Rape of Lucretia he was the “nobly compassionate” Collatinus; and above all in Tim Albery’s 1988 staging of Billy Budd he was a “lowering, baleful presence” as the evil Claggart.
In 1986 Van Allan was made director of the National Opera Studio, which he ran until 2001. He later explained: “One of the big problems these days is projecting text. Even after years at the colleges, many of the students arriving here are still so voice-preoccupied. It’s one of our jobs to reinforce the fantastic importance of the text.” Where modern works were concerned, he felt, “most importantly, singers have to find a way of using ‘classical’ singing techniques to negotiate the athletics that modern music demands.”
Although once he had started this new part of his career, his appearances became less frequent, he still added new parts, and in 1994 achieved his ambition of singing the title role in Massenet’s Don Quichotte at English National Opera. This was a role he seemed destined for, his lean figure and ability to suggest the inner turmoil of a character, lending just the right mixture of pathos and humour to Cervantes’s knight.
Colleagues recall that Van Allan was such a natural stage animal, that just his presence in the cast would often serve to pull things together. Some later new roles included Tiresias in John Buller’s The Bacchae, the Man Without a Conscience in Nigel Osborne’s Goya opera Terrible Mouth, and King Hildebrand in Ken Russell’s outrageous production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida.
Diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, Van Allan chose to bring his career full circle, appearing one last time at Glyndebourne in the comic speaking role of Frosch in Die Fledermaus in the autumn of 2006. He particularly enjoyed the opportunity of “conducting” the orchestra for the encores. A grand man of the theatre, a much-loved member of opera ensembles who was also a star performer, Van Allan is survived by his wife Rosemary, and children Guy and Emma; another son, Robert, predeceased him.
