Margaret Balfour

Who was Margaret Balfour?

Margaret Balfour was an English classical Contralto of the 1920s and 1930s. She is best remembered as the angel in Elgar's own recorded excerpts of The Dream of Gerontius and one of the 16 soloists in the original performance of Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music.

She was also recorded by HMV singing Bach's Mass in B Minor with Elisabeth Schumann and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates in sessions in 1929 at Kingsway Hall, London. She sang in the St Matthew Passion in November 1929 at Westminster with the Bach Cantata Club under Charles Kennedy Scott. She sang Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with the BBC Chorus and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini at the Queen's Hall, London, on 3 November 1937. She was a soloist at the Handel Festival conducted by Henry Wood at Alexandra Palace in 1939.