Baritone and music teacher known for his performances of the part of Christ in Bach's St Matthew Passion
The baritone John Carol Case, who has died aged 89, was best known for his many performances of the part of Christ in Bach's St Matthew Passion. His great love of language shone through in the clarity of his diction and the way he could energise the text, thereby clarifying its meaning. As a result he was much in demand as an interpreter of 20th-century English music, and of two composers' work in particular.
In 1948 a teaching colleague put him forward as the soloist in Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols, with the composer himself conducting. Other performances directed by the grand old man of British music followed, not only of his own compositions, but also of the St Matthew Passion, in his home town of Dorking, Surrey.
John regarded the recording he made in 1968 of VW's Sea Symphony with the soprano Sheila Armstrong and Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra as a career highlight. Five years later the same forces recorded VW's Dona Nobis Pacem, and in 1974 John sang Christ on Boult's recording of Elgar's The Apostles.
The other composer whom John had a notable working relationship with was Gerald Finzi. They met after a 1951 concert in the newly opened Royal Festival Hall in London. John had performed Finzi's set of five Shakespeare songs, Let Us Garlands Bring, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under George Weldon, and the composer invited him to his home in Ashmansworth, Hampshire, to go through more of his works.
Finzi died aged just 55 in 1956, and John then premiered two song collections, I Said to Love and To a Poet. He subsequently recorded all Finzi's settings of Thomas Hardy with another composer, Howard Ferguson, at the piano.
John was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his father was an undertaker and a keen amateur singer, and he was given the middle name Carol so that if he ever wanted to become a professional musician he could call himself John Carol instead. He attended Bishop Wordsworth's grammar school, and then won a choral scholarship to King's College, Cambridge – at first as a countertenor rather than a baritone.
After studying music for a year, in 1942 he volunteered for the army, returning after the second world war to graduate in 1947. David Willcocks, organ scholar at King's at the time, recalls that he gave John his first paid engagement with the Cambridge Philharmonic Orchestra while they were still students.
This was the beginning of a long professional association between the two which included 20 consecutive Palm Sunday performances of the St Matthew Passion in the Royal Festival Hall with the Bach Choir. In 1968, John and the then treble Bob Chilcott were the soloists on Willcocks's recording of Fauré's Requiem with the King's College Choir.
On leaving university, finding it difficult to get work as a solo singer in the austerity years after the war, John took the jobs of director of music at King's College school, Wimbledon, and director of the Townswomen's Guild Choir. Once he had achieved all he could hope to as a singer, he retired from performing in 1976 at the relatively early age of 52 and returned to teaching, now keen to pass on his expertise to students, both as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and as a freelance coach.
He had already been going up to Cambridge one day a week on his motorbike – he confessed that if he could have his time over again, it would be as a racing motorcyclist – and so when I, too, found myself at King's as an 18-year-old choral scholar, he was my new singing teacher. In 1989 John retired fully to Thornton-le-Dale, North Yorkshire, where he sang in the village choir, and four years later was appointed OBE.
John is survived by his partner of 55 years, Bob Wardell.
• John Carol Case, singer and teacher, born 27 April 1923; died 28 December 2012