Mark Neale’s fond recollections of famous rock stars at St George’s Hall in the 1970s (minus Queen) prompted T&A reader Paul Stephenson from Shipley to recall the years when other stars shone in Bradford.

“I’ve seen such world famous artists as Paul Robeson, Mario Lanza, Artur Rubinstein, Dame Myra Hess and many others. In those days, Bradford got all the top artists,” he said.

Go back far enough, of course, and Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Winston Churchill and many more could be added to the list of great performers who have appeared at St George’s in the past 160 years.

Pianist Dame Myra Hess made her name by giving a series of wartime lunchtime concerts at London’s National Gallery. She played in a Subscription Concert at St George’s Hall in February 1942 and was due to play another one in December 1958 when she was engaged to play Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the Halle Orchestra.

But a bout of flu obliged her to cancel. Her place was taken by Phyllis Sellick.

Heart-throb tenor Mario Lanza, whose million-selling recording of Be My Love guaranteed him the kind of attention later devoted to the likes of David Bowie, did not live long enough to make return trips to Bradford.

Such was the popularity of the American-Italian singer and film star that his concert at St George’s Hall on Tuesday, March 13, 1958, attracted an audience of 2,200 who paid more than £2,000.

They came from all over the North of England, the Midlands and even two ladies from London who made a night of it by stopping over in a hotel.

“What is the secret of Mario Lanza?” asked the T&A’s Michael Colbert, who covered the concert. “Seemingly he has a voice that can charm the masses and in his sentimental songs can move them to hysteria.

“That happened last night in the second half of the programme, when the sentimental held sway, when the voice was used to express trite romantic meanings, when the tear-jerking catch in his voice was brought into full play.”

The classically orientated first half – Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Cilea – reportedly had the audience restless. They wanted what Colbert dismissed as the “sugary type of song”.

The management of St George’s, recognising a good thing when they saw it, put up ticket prices for the singer’s return visit the following Tuesday. The show, however, did not go on. Lanza, taken ill in Rome, was forbidden by his doctors to travel.

The concert was rearranged for April, but that did not take place either due to more illness. He died in October 1959 at the age of 38.

Mr Stephenson’s memory of Polish pianist Artur Rubinstein in Bradford must be the St George’s Hall concert in February 1975, when the keyboard maestro entertained 2,000 people with a programme that included pieces by Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Chabrier, Mendelssohn and Villa Lobos.

Not bad for a man of 87. Five years later, he separated from his wife Aniela after 48 years of marriage. He died in December 1982 at the age of 95. By his side was Annabelle Whitestone, a young Englishwoman who had been his companion for three years.

Paul Robeson, the son of a runaway slave and holder of a law degree who died at the age of 77 in 1976, last sang in Bradford on March 1, 1960 Over 20 years, the big American came to the city several times, appearing at Eastbrook Hall as well as St George’s Hall, where his final show in the city took place.

Although best known for negro spirituals, folk songs and songs from George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess, his recital included pieces by Handel, J S Bach, Smetana and Beethoven.

In his T&A report, Michael Colbert noted that the singer used an electronic device attached to his spectacles and fitted into one of his ears that enabled him to hear what the audience was receiving. What is commonplace today was unheard of, almost, 53 years ago.