Off key

Alex Salmond’s boast that he was a better boy singer than pallid Aled Jones (your report, 2 February) leaves me cold.

I first broadcast from London on Children’s Hour on the BBC Home Service at the age of 12 as boy soprano. I was an alto in the Choir of King’s College Chapel Choir from 1956-59. As a tenor, I enjoyed a career in recital, oratorio, opera, radio, television and recording as, to quote The Scotsman music critic in 1974, “Scotland’s foremost lyric tenor.”

Now, following my laryngectomy operation for voice cancer, I’m told I have a bass voice “like Chaliapin”. Voila! A serial vocal quartet. Beat that Mr Salmond. Mind you, I have to confess, I may have misheard the final ascription. It could have been “Charlie Chaplin”.

Rev Clifford Hughes

Rumbling Bridge

Kinross