It was only really with Mélisande for Pierre Boulez and Countess Almaviva for Otto Klemperer that Elisabeth Söderström became a star on records. Both those sets were recorded in 1970, but she first sang at Covent Garden a decade earlier, with the Swedish National Opera, and that same summer of 1960 appeared at the Proms with the two arias from Le nozze di Figaro, which are the earliest items here. Her voice was already fully recognisable, with an attractive, slightly edgy quality, a sense of high-strung emotion being one of the temperaments she best conveyed.

Fast-forward to 1971 for a superb account of Ravel’s Shéhérazade. As I recall, it was a very hot night at the Royal Albert Hall. Did she wear a green and gold kaftan? Nostalgia is a dangerous game for a reviewer: better stick to the facts. As with Boulez’s later recordings of the cycle, he makes the orchestral textures shimmer without ever losing the clarity of the individual instrumental solos. It is of course a bit remote in mono compared with his recent DG issue.

Söderström, too, can be heard singing the cycle on another CD (from Bluebell – see page 91), but that is in Swedish, and just a curiosity. This Shéhérazade can be set beside the best. The range of the part seems exactly right for her; she relishes the mezzo-ish textures, but soars at the climax of ‘Asie’ to a heartfelt ‘Ou bien de haine’. There is a sense of child-like wonder in her recitation of all the wonders of the East, whereas in ‘L’indifférent’ she doesn’t sound so much like a slave-girl as an ardent lover: fascinating.

The Strauss items under Antál Dorati from 1976 are in stereo and are better balanced, although Söderström is still well to the fore. She recorded both of them a few years later with Richartd Armstrong and the WNO Orchestra (EMI, nla), and in 1973 she had included the Capriccio monologue on her first opera recital, for Swedish EMI (also nla). The performances here are superior. While one may ideally wish for a weightier tone at certain moments in the Four Last Songs, they gain at every point from the beauty of Söderström’s voice and her alert way with the words which was always so evident in concert. Madeleine in Capriccio was one of her greatest roles, and it’s lovely to hear this scene, but I wish someone would issue the Glyndebourne broadcast from the same year.

As it is, this a wholly engrossing portrait of Söderström on the concert platform. As she wrote in her delightful autobiography (In My Own Key, Hamish Hamilton: 1979) her ‘intense desire’ was to be allowed ‘to share the worlds of beauty from which I myself derive such endless stimulation.’