A burst of applause greets another two superbly transferred Festival Documents, as they are earnestly called, from live Austrian Radio recordings in the archive of the Salzburg Festival. First, the 50-year-old, yet vocally ageless, Walter Berry in 1979, with the instinctive, sentient accompanying of Rudolf Buchbinder. Totally relaxed and unselfconscious, Berry draws in his audience at the start with the simplest of Mendelssohn's strophic songs, lingering and smiling through their confiding phrases. He then withdraws into the distant, intensely private world of the Harper from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, in three of Hugo Wolf's settings. Berry gives each word perfectly judged weight and measure within Wolf's ardent melodic line.
Berry's baritone darkens and expands to fill the long sighs of nostalgic late romanticism in four of Hans Pfitzner's sombre intimations of mortality, before clicking his heels as a trim, highly strung, yet always tender soldier-boy in a group of songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection.
Nine years earlier, Hermann Prey and Wolfgang Sawallisch had focused on Pfitzner and Richard Strauss alone. The natural restraint and shadows of melancholy within Prey's baritone always found deep resonance and empathy with the sense of longing at the heart of the late-romantic Lied. He is entirely at one with the Weltschmerz of Pfitzner's austere Heinrich Heine settings; his baritone is all but etiolated at the end of the long bleak phrases so sensitively supported in the fingers of Sawallisch, and he knows just how to recreate the almost desperate energy of the livelier songs.
Pfitzner's setting of Eichendorff's poem Im Danzig must be a strong contender for the gloomiest song ever written, so it is with some relief that one moves on to Richard Strauss. Here, too, Prey reveals more sobriety than smiles in his choice of songs of night and solitude. Even in the tender Du meines Herzes Kronelein from Op 21 and in the warm and generous thanks-giving of his final encore, Zueignung, there is a palpable and often moving sense of the latent melancholy so distinctive to Prey's sophisticated artistry. Readers should be warned that these Festspieldokumente contain no song texts.'