Alexander Young

Could you tell us how you came to be cast as Tom Rakewell in the first English performance of The Rake's Progress?

Well, a good few years ago now, when in fact I was at Glyndebourne I think at the time. And David Harris, who was then the BBC's opera department manager, asked if I would look at the then new opera by Stravinsky, The Rake's Progress, to come and sing some of it for an audition. Which I did. And I was cast as Tom Rakewell in what was the first performance in England of this opera.

How did it happen that Stravinsky himself chose you to sing that part in the recording?

It came about as a result of a Sadler's Wells tour on the continent. We'd been to many places and we ended up in Hamburg. Where we had what, as far as I can remember, was one of the most stupendous ovations that I've ever known in the Opera House. And we came home after that ovation. And a few days later I was in Sadler's Wells rehearsing another opera and somebody handed me a telegram, which I opened quite casually and the purport of the telegram was an invitation to go to New York to singing the opera in Carnegie Hall for Stravinsky's eightieth birthday celebrations. And of course, needless to say, I said yes, I would go and in the course of that production I met Stravinsky and both the librettists as well, incidentally, Auden and Kalman. And it was as a result of that that Stravinsky, when he decided to re-record the opera, asked me to sing the title role.