Muriel Hall

Muriel Hall-Plamondon, contralto (born 11 December 1913 in L'Isle-Verte, near Rivière-du-Loup, Québec; died 15 January 2012 in Québec City). Muriel Hall-Plamondon studied singing with François-Xavier Mercier, as well as with his wife, Isa Jeynevald-Mercier, and with Jean-Marie Lachance, one of Mercier’s former students. Muriel Hall began a very active career in the Québec City area in 1933. She sang at the Palais Montcalm, at Université Laval and at the Château Frontenac. Other Québec City institutions at which she appeared as a guest soloist included the Club musical de Québec, the Cercle philharmonique de Québec, and the Orchestre symphonique de Québec.

In 1935, she auditioned for Wilfrid Pelletier, who advised her to seek further training in Europe, but she chose not to. At the time of her marriage (17 August 1944), Pelletier suggested that she go to New York and audition for the Metropolitan Opera, but once again, she did not take his advice. In March 1940, she took first place in a province-wide music competition, the Festival-Concours de musique du Québec. But she pursued most of her singing career on the airwaves of Radio-Canada, starting when radio station CRCK first began broadcasting in Québec City in 1934, and then on CBV in 1936. She also sang on CKCV. She performed regularly with the Petite Symphonie de Radio-Canada (under the direction of Captain Charles O'Neil and J.-Robert Talbot) and on various radio programs, such as L'Heure provinciale, Fantaisies musicales, Concert intime, Concert de Québec, Le Réveil rural, under the baton of conductors such as Edwin Bélanger, Jean Deslauriers and Jean-Josaphat Gagnier. Outside the Québec City region, she sang at the Théâtre Saint-Denis in Montréal on 20 April 1944 for a wartime broadcast entitled L'Heure de la Victoire (The Hour of Victory), along with such artists as tenor Jan Pierce, conductor Georges Sebastian and French actor Charles Boyer.

After World War II, Plamondon began to take an interest in folklore and was invited to sing at the Sorbonne in Paris, as part of a concert presented by the French Society for Folklore and Traditional Civilization on 5 July 1948. While in Paris, she made a few recordings, the only ones of her career. A year later, she sang at the Opéra de Québec Enr. and the Opéra français Enr. (Faust, in both cases, Théâtre Capitole, April and October 1949). She was a member of the jury for the Québec City Opera Foundation’s Raoul Jobin Competition.

Plamondon was married to the sculptor and stained-glass artist Marius Plamondon (1914-1976). Her personal documents are housed at the Archives nationales du Québec in Québec City.