If a singer of the young Margaret Price's radiant gifts were to walk into a recording studio today, the microphones would fairly tingle with excitement. CfP had the foresight to book her for some of her earliest solo recordings and were rewarded with memorable discs that have taken longer than they should have done to appear on CD. The two Schubert songs here date from 1971, when the voice was sparklingly clear and fresh, glinting with early morning sunshine. Her singing of Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, in which she duets with Jack Brymer's cultivated clarinet, is one of the prime examples of the soprano's early art, recognizable from her athletic striding from one note to the next and a gleaming certainty of tone production. The only drawback is some want of romantic sensitivity on the part of her accompanist, James Lockhart.
That remains a problem in the Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Liszt, which made up a single LP recital disc, but only a couple of years on Price's singing had already started to explore more subtle shades of colour. The voice has probably never sounded better than it does in her early Frauenliebe und -leben, still youthful and flexible, but deepening in tone as it grows more mature. I would prefer the spontaneity of this first recording of the cycle to her second, issued recently on Forlane (10/94), as I also would the Liszt songs here, which were to be duplicated on the uneasily-sung Liszt recital disc later released by Teldec (12/86). Together with RCA's double-CD set (5/95), collectors of Dame Margaret's art at last have most of the early recordings to hand – except, of course, the rest of that delectable 1971 Schubert LP.'