Ah! Belinda I am prest

The New Zealand soprano, Eleanor Houston, was born in Wellington in 1916 and attended the NSW Conservatorium of Music, learning singing from the Marianne Mathy. In 1947 won the Sun Aria Competition. Two years later the Sun Aria was won by Joan Sutherland and in 1950 by June Bronhill. The Sun Aria award proved to be a stepping stone to a successful career as a dramatic soprano. She toured New Zealand and Australia with the Italian Opera Company singing Santuzza as well as in productions of Wagner and Verdi operas. In London, Eleanor Houston joined the ranks of many other great Australian contemporaries (such as Sylvia Fisher, Rosina Raisbeck and William Herbert ) singing as a Principal Artist with Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden opera companies from 1950-1955 where she was particularly acclaimed as a singer of Mozart. She travelled and performed extensively, including in Scotland, Wales, Italy and South Africa. She returned to Australia in 1959 and began teaching singing on the South Coast, also attracting pupils from the Southern Highlands, Goulburn and Canberra. In mid-1967 she and her husband, who had a piano-tuning business (tuning for the ABC in New South Wales and Victoria) moved to Canberra to keep up with demand. It was then that she firmly stamped her mark on the musical landscape of Canberra. In the late 1960s she began working towards the establishment of an opera company in Canberra, along with Professor Geoffrey Brennan and Ken Healy. This performance of the opening scene of Henry Purcell's DIDO & AENEAS comes from a studio recording made in 1951. Eleanor Houston sings the title role of Dido with Adele Leigh as Belinda. The Stuart Chamber Chorus and Chamber Orchestra of London is with conductor Jackson Gregory.