This issue, a very generous offering, combines two separate films featuring the remarkable German singer, one who has encompassed most of the heights of both the mezzo and soprano repertory with continuing success. Annette Schreier’s profile alternates a long interview with Meier and extracts from many of her roles in Austro- German houses, showing her music-dramatic gifts at their most potent.

We learn of her happy childhood andupbringing, the early start of her career, an unexpected début at Bayreuth in 1983 – as Kundry (when she was expecting Erda at best) – and her subsequent success everywhere shehas appeared. She talks at length and with astonishing insight about her approach to her roles and her career, and how she manages the peripatetic life of an international singer. She seems happiest at home in Munich, where she attempts to lead a normal life, apparently on her own (relationships are not discussed).

Many colleagues speak highly of her talent, notably Domingo, Hans Sotin (her teacher and adviser), Barenboim and Siegfried Jerusalem. We see her all too briefly in fragments of Wagnerian roles, for which she is best known, and as Leonore (in a peculiar Munich staging of Fidelio), Dido (Les Troyens), Amneris (Aida) and The Composer (Ariadne). There is some intelligent coverage of rehearsals, especially at Bayreuth with Domingo (Siegmund) and Jerusalem (Tristan), showing Meier’s ability to improvise and her rapport with her tenorcolleagues. The downside of the whole film is its restlessness, all too typical of profiles of this kind. Nobody, including Meier, is allowed to talk for more than about two minutes at a time and the opera excerpts are inartistically interleaved with the chat, each too short to give a fair idea of Meier’s gifts as a singing-actress.

The 2001 Das Lied von der Erde is quite a moving experience, mainly because of Bychkov’s total empathy with, and understanding of, the work and his ability to draw the best from an orchestra, though I missed the saturated string sound of the Vienna Philharmonic in this score. Meier’s voice has always lacked the rounded tone and warmth tocompletely fulfil Mahler’s emotional demands. Torsten Kerl, a tenor new to me, sounds –like so many of his kind – a bit over-parted in his first song, where his phrasing is choppy.He finds true form in his later songs,particularly his third. The video direction here is very sensitive, the sound excellent.