Benjamin Britten once uttered words to the effect, ‘Thank goodness, I’m not one of those musicians who talks’. Nowadays, it is difficult for even the most taciturn musician not to talk, so persistent is the media’s demand for copy or, in the case of the BBC, pre- and post-performance soundbites. Which is not to deny the value of the well-prepared, well-edited interview that takes, as it were, an overview of a career.

Jon Tolansky’s ‘Close Encounters with Great Singers’ is a made-for-radio project. Each programme runs for some 70 minutes, with a 50-50 division of words and music using seven or eight carefully chosen musical excerpts as cues for conversation. It works well, though collectors will be annoyed to find that VAI has placed talk and music on a single track within each topic area. If, later, you want direct access to the music, you will need to annotate the booklet and scroll on through the chat.

This is not the place to reveal the close detail of these conversations. Suffice it to say that the Fischer-Dieskau interview is a classic of its kind, that the Vickers, though less ‘finished’ as a conversation piece, is laden with interest, and that the Freni disc contains some glorious singing.

Tolansky is a sophisticated and articulate interviewer, a connoisseur of operatic interpretation, whose only failing is a tendency to out-think and out-talk his subject. In Fischer-Dieskau he meets his match: a man of wit and erudition, who, even when speaking in English, has a lawyer’s ear for the niceties of argument. The conversation, which is worth hearing simply as a conversation, ranges over opera and song, conducting and teaching, with some memories of Benjamin Britten thrown in for good measure.

Buried within the Fischer-Dieskau conversation are two pieces of bad news for readers of Gramophone. The first, for collectors, is his belief that all his recordings of Schubert’s Winterreise have something to say but that none gets close to saying it all. The second, for the ‘industry’, is that 10 years ago his pupils would arrive knowing the relevant recordings. Now they arrive knowing none. The post-1980s generation of aspiring musicians, he suggests, doesn’t buy records and doesn’t have much interest in learning from them.

Jon Vickers is a compelling subject but will always be an uncomfortable one for unbelievers and moral relativists. The story of how he came to be a professional singer is fascinating but Vickers the musical zealot is trickier to handle. When I was writing my Karajan biography I spent several days with him at his home in Bermuda. I recorded nothing and made no notes, except retrospectively each evening. Quoted out of context, he can seem extreme; taken ‘in the round’ he is a man of deep and penetrating humanity. The Tolansky interview is no more than a snapshot: vivid in places, out of focus in others. The Beecham reminiscences are superb, the anatomising of the character of Peter Grimes – something that has always caused much grinding of the teeth among the Aldeburgh faithful – is extraordinarily powerful. (The contents of Vickers’ magnificent library confirmed for me his interest in Crabbe’s original poem.)

Mirella Freni is a glorious singer and this programme is full of wonderful music-making. Her English is good enough for her to tell a couple of stories well (the account of Karajan auditioning her for the role of Mimì is riveting) but often she struggles to express herself clearly. Here Tolansky turns his connoisseurship to advantage, feeding Freni with ideas about her (and in some instances, Karajan’s) interpretations of the music of Puccini and Verdi which are not her own but probably would be if she had the words to express them.

That said, even in her native Italian, Freni might find it difficult to explain the inexplicable. What emerges about Karajan is what Vickers also told me about him and Knappertsbusch and Kempe and others of that era: that interpretation was rarely discussed. Rather, it was conveyed through sound and gesture, and a musical relationship born of thorough schooling, intuition and trust. The last thing they did was talk.