Eleanor Cresset

Oxford’s greatest living musical name: a contralto of the cathedral foundation, called the Deep Bell, who sings the winter offices in a cold nave and fills rooms at the Red Hart and in London with canons, merchants and ministers.

Eleanor Cresset, the Deep Bell, is an Oxford-born contralto of the cathedral foundation and the city’s greatest living musical name. Oxford’s public music is the chapter’s, and much of it is for the dead; she sings the winter offices in a cold nave, and Oxford is, if anything, quieter about her than it need be. Each winter she also returns to the Red Hart Rooms, the city’s principal secular concert hall, where her audience includes canons, merchants and ministers in equal embarrassment at finding one another there.

Her reputation long ago outran the Red Hart. She appears each winter at Vexley Hall in London, where the capital receives her as proof that it can admire what it did not make and appropriate a provincial glory without pretending otherwise. She and Nell Vetch, the Cinder Lark of Sarrum, can both fill a London room while standing for almost opposite ideas of respectable performance: hers is carried by reputation into distant rooms, the Lark’s by ballads, workers and cheap copies.

She is said to rehearse alone in the nave before dawn, when the stone is coldest and the sound least kind, on the principle that a voice which holds there will hold anywhere. She sings what she chooses and rarely explains the choice, and Oxford, which likes its performers corrected and shortened, has long since given up trying to correct her.

Companies meet the Deep Bell less often than they meet her audiences. A winter night at the Red Hart puts chapter, trade and ministry under one roof, and the winter road between Oxford and the capital, which she travels every year with her household and her luggage, is one on which a voice of such value is expected to arrive safely.

In person

Eleanor Cresset is tall and statuesque, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with dark brown to black hair set in a formal updo and a composed, mature face with a strong throat and jaw and dark, expressive eyes. She wears concert gowns in dark blue, black, silver and deep violet, elegant but severe, and a distinctive piece of jewellery at the throat. On a platform her posture is entirely controlled, and she gives the impression of having measured the room before she sings a note in it.