Lois Marshall was one of Canada's best-known and best-loved singers. She was celebrated by the New York Times as "a singer who could make 'Frere Jacques' sound like a cry from the heart". Musical America marveled at "her power to project with great immediacy and conviction the words and music she is singing; singing seems as natural to her as speech to a great actor."

Lois Marshall didn't so much sing as radiate a song. Her voice was coveted by the greatest conductors, adored by audiences the world over and worshipped in Russia, and yet she remained very much a Canadian, only really at home in Toronto, where she was born into a musical family in 1924.

Among the first to recognize Marshall's musicality was Sir Ernest MacMillan, who engaged her as soprano soloist with the Toronto Symphony and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir for Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1947. It was her first professional engagement. In 1950 Marshall won the Eaton Scholarship as the top graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. That same year she became a household name across Canada through her first-place win in the CBC competition, Singing Stars of Tomorrow. In 1952 she won the prestigious Naumburg award, which entitled her to a New York debut at Town Hall. The recital was a smash hit and led to recognition by no less than Arturo Toscanini, who invited Miss Marshall to sing and record Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Her international career blossomed and she performed in solo recitals and orchestral appearances throughout North America, Britain, Europe, Australia and Russia, where audiences especially adored her.

In 1986 Miss Marshall joined the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music and continued to teach there until her death at age 73 of complications following surgery.

Photo: Harry Palmer