Norman Walker was one of our leading basses for some 17 years from 1937 when he sang as the Commendatore and the Speaker at Glyndebourne and King Mark (with Dame Eva Turner as Isolde) at Covent Garden. From then on he balanced his career nicely between the stage and the concert-hall. After the war, he shared the role of Collatinus with Brannigan in the early performances of The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne and was principal bass for six years with the Covent Garden company from 1948 (returning as Mark, now with Flagstad as Isolde). At the same time he appeared up and down the country in countless oratorio performances, a much-loved soloist.
This welcome reissue opens resplendently with Walker singing Handel and Haydn in the classic manner: steady, burnished tone, every run in its place and diction exemplary. As he intones “The trumpet shall sound” or “Now Heav’n in fullest glory” we believe him absolutely, the execution is so secure, the projection so forthright. Then comes Walker’s unsurpassed account of the Angel of the Agony’s solo from Gerontius, so urgent, so sympathetic, here allowed to run on to let us hear Heddle Nash sing “I go before my judge” so movingly.
Of Walker’s opera repertory we hear a student account of “O Isis und Osiris”, which gives some evidence of what was to follow, and a test made in 1944 for Walter Legge of Osmin’s aria, which suggests he might have been a good interpreter of that role. The extracts, happily revived, from HMV’s “History of Music in Sound”, indicate Walker’s dramatic prowess (though his Italian is far from idiomatic) – as does his brief contribution to the closing trio from Faust, with Joan Cross a suitably distraught Marguerite.
More valuable than these, however, because they display so unerringly Walker’s gifts as a conviction-singer, are the four British songs made at one session in 1952 with Gerald Moore. They are exemplified in the bass’s confident tone, unobtrusive word-painting, subtle use of rubato and, for want of a better word, ‘face’. Indeed the singer, in these faultless transfers, seems in the room with us as the youth bewailing Phyllis’s treachery but taking the consolation offered by pretty Kate, and as the proponent of deep love evinced in Love, could I only tell thee. Trifles are thus turned into great art. Malcolm Walker provides a warm, personal cameo of his father in his notes.'