After education at North Sydney Boys' High School, and training at the NSW Conservatorium, Lionel Sawkins sang as a Bass Lay Clerk at St. Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney before his appointment as Director of Music of the Church of England Grammar School, Brisbane. While in Brisbane, he organised a Three Choirs' Festival and trained boys' choruses for the National (Elizabethan Trust) Opera under Karl Rankl, and for the ABC. After coming to England in 1958 he was appointed Organist of Holy Trinity, Beckenham and Head of Music at Upton House School in East London. During these years he initiated the Beckenham Summer Choral Festival to enable local choirs to join together to perform major works. He also prepared boys' choirs for the Philharmonia under Leopold Stokowski and for productions at the Royal Opera House including Tosca with Maria Callas. In 1966, he was appointed Music
Lecturer at Whitelands College (later Roehampton Institute). In 1971-2
he spent a stimulating and productive year on the new MA Course at
Nottingham University in the Interpretation and Editing of Renaissance
and Baroque Music, devised by Professors Denis Arnold and Stanley
Boorman. Although Lionel Sawkins’s original intention was to work
on English music (he had prepared editions of Dowland and Boyce) he
soon turned his attention to French music, at the suggestion of
Professor Arnold. At this time, Philippe Oboussier had revived works by
both François Couperin and Michel-Richard de Lalande,
manuscripts of which were at St. Michael’s College, Tenbury, and
these had been performed by Roger Norrington. It was clear that other
works of Lalande at Tenbury merited attention, notably Lalande’s Exaltabo te, Domine, now
recorded by Martin Gester and Le Parlement de Musique for Opus 111.
Thus began Lionel Sawkins’s work on French Baroque music that has
extended over more than 30 years since. His PhD for London University
was on the sacred music of Lalande.
Performances with Lionel Sawkins’s
period-instrument group, Les Musiciens du Roi, were given at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall, and Lina Lalandi invited Sawkins to contribute concerts
and editions to the English Bach Festival in Oxford and London. In 1977
he produced his first Rameau edition with La
Princesse de Navarre presented by the EBF
(for which he also acted as chorus master) at the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden. This was the first time any music by Rameau had ever
been heard in that house. Six years later, in 1983, the tercentenary of
Rameau’s birth, Lionel Sawkins unearthed in a Bordeaux library
the complete performing material of the 1763 revival of La Princesse de Navarre, the
fourth of such major Rameau discoveries he made – he had earlier
identified original performing material of La
Naissance d’Osiris, Anacréon,
and, most importantly, of Pigmalion, leading to a new edition significantly different from
that then in use. This was first broadcast by Trevor Pinnock and the
English Concert for the European Broadcasting Union in 1998, and most
recently performed at the 2005 Musikfestspiele Potsdam-Sans Souci, by
the New York Baroque Dance Company and Lautten Compagney, Berlin.
Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Lionel Sawkins
continued to produce a steady stream of first editions both of operas
such as Royer’s Zaïde (being performed complete for the first time in 2005 for
the tercentenary of the composer’s birth), Rameau’s Les Fêtes de Ramire and
Lully’s Isis, as well as some 20 more motets of Lalande. Recordings of his
editions appeared on the Erato, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, ASV and Opus
111 labels. In 1990 and again in 2001, the Centre de Musique Baroque at
Versailles invited Lionel Sawkins to act as Artistic Advisor for their
festivals of the music of Lalande and for these he produced programme
books and editions for the many concerts, broadcasts and recordings
which followed, and directed the first international conference on
Lalande’s music. Recent outstanding performances of his editions
of Lalande’s motets include Cantate
Domino performed by the choir of St
Thomas’s, Leipzig, and Concerto Köln in the opening concert
of the Leipzig Bachfest in 2002, three performances of the same work by Uppsala
Cathedral Choir, Sweden with the Stockholm Baroque Orchestra, and two
by the Nonsuch Singers in London, who have also performed Sacris solemniis and Regina cœli.
Lionel Sawkins worked in Paris in 1982-83 to help
establish the Centre d’Information et de Documentation (Recherche
Musicale) of the CNRS, and at the same time contributed more than 400
citations (mostly of the motets of Lully and Lalande) to the Catalogue thématique du grand motet
français, published in 1984 under the
direction of Jean Mongrédien. The same year, Lionel Sawkins
directed performances of Lalande grands
motets in Paris with Schola Cantorum of
Oxford and the Orchestre de Paris-Sorbonne. He also gave seminars in
the 1980s for the Groupe de Formation Doctorale (Musique et
Musicologie) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and
directed seminars and workshops in universities in France, Germany, the
USA, Japan and Australia. He has contributed numerous articles to
musical dictionaries in France and in Britain and his Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de
Lalande 1657-1726, prepared with the help of
John Nightingale and the support of the British Academy, is about to be
published by Oxford University Press. In 1996, the French Minister of
Culture named Lionel Sawkins as Chevalier
de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (he
was promoted as Officier in the same order in 2001) in recognition of his
‘contribution à la diffusion de la musique
française en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde’.
