Nearly every year seems to bring new Ferrier discoveries. Most of those on this issue are more than worth hearing. Particularly important is the performance by its dedicatee of the Berkeley cycle, Ferrier’s first surviving recorded collaboration with Barbirolli. Her singing is as balm to the ear, as is her attention to the meaning of the texts of these lovely settings.

From a quite different tradition come the three quartets by Brahms. These form the first half of the 1952 Edinburgh Festival concert that included the Liebeslieder Waltzes already issued by Decca (9/92). Ferrier’s solo contributions are more marked but it is the euphony of the four voices and the ardour in which they project Brahms’s settings that is most enjoyable. Patzak’s plangent tenor is to the fore and Seefried soars easily on the top line. The three recordings of Brahms songs from a BBC recital are also pleasurable.

From the 1947 Edinburgh Festival come two precious though maddeningly brief extracts, apparently uncovered in a junk shop, from Das Lied von der Erde, Ferrier’s first collaboration in the work with Bruno Walter. Interesting as it is to have Ferrier singing in the final song, that is familiar from her later recordings. It is the virtually complete fifth song as sung by Peter Pears that is so fascinating, not only showing what a loss it was that he never seems to have sung the work again, but also because he sings it with such uninhibited passion. We also have – at last in full form – the famous party ‘recital’ in which a slightly inebriated Ferrier lets her hair down to amusing effect.

The rest is less remarkable. Ferrier sounds unsuitably heavy by today’s standards in the Baroque pieces, where the sound is also poor, and the alternative takes of the Handel and Mendelssohn arias may only be of interest to completists. But that should not deter her admirers from acquiring the disc, which is complemented by Paul Campion’s well-informed notes on the provenance of the recordings, which he has been instrumental in uncovering.