Generous tone, warm feeling, expressive colouring, ample power and range…and the ‘wobble’. But just what, exactly, is this ‘wobble’? No trouble in identifying it: it’s there in the very first notes in the recital, ‘Dich, teure Halle’. But, although the ears cannot fail to pick it up and wish it wasn’t there, the actual degree of it is not so very great. The vibrations are sometimes wider than we might wish, and more uneven; the surprising thing is that such small deviations from the desirable norm can so trouble the hearing. Next moment they won’t be there at all. This solo continues with many of its phrases entirely steady; then the momentarily irregular vibrations intrude again. Now you hear them, now you don’t. The first ‘Sei mir gegrüsst’ wobbles; the second is steady. And so forth.

Liebestod and Immolation nevertheless renew their power. She is not a prosaic singer and, even in extracts, can evoke an awareness of the mighty context. At times (the opening of the Liebestod, for instance) she infuses into the voice an almost mystical quality. This is a curious recording, a rather late attempt to make amends to this internationally acclaimed artist (then in her mid-50s) for the major companies’ disinclination to encourage her career on records after about 1970 and so ‘immortalise’ her for posterity. There’s less than an hour’s recording time here, and still less of actual singing. It was made in 1991, so I suppose that by now we are ‘posterity’. If so, I think it has to be said that posterity (jury-like) is still ‘out’.