When the South African tenor Johan Botha died in September last year, the opera world lost one of its most reliable, clarion-toned tenor voices. But while this memorial issue of extracts from live performances at the Vienna State Opera focuses on his German roles, the booklet tribute is surely right to emphasise his background in the Italian repertoire as being the foundation on which those qualities were built.

It’s the impeccably schooled Italianate quality that he brought to everything he sang that made him such a remarkable artist, while his legato line, cleanness of timbre and clear-sighted musicianship were what made him such a refreshing performer in repertoire that one often hears barked. The flipside was that those same remarkable qualities, allied to his equable stage persona, also arguably brought certain dramatic drawbacks, as undoubtedly did the restrictions imposed on his acting by his size.

That means that he’s at his best here at those works with a certain abstract quality, or which don’t require getting down and dirty dramatically speaking: embodying the impersonal masculinity of Strauss’s Emperor (one of his very best roles); singing with rare elegance, if rather tightly, as Lohengrin or, for James Rutherford’s avuncular Sachs, Walther; tireless as Strauss’s Apollo (also recorded complete by Decca) and Bacchus. That substantial Ariadne chunk, tenderly conducted by Christian Thielemann and with Soile Isokoski as delicate Ariadne, is probably the disc’s highlight.

Temperamentally Botha was less well suited to Florestan’s alternating despair and elation, or to the psychological torment of Tannhäuser or Parsifal; but the extracts here nevertheless show that his singing of the roles was always of the very highest quality. The collection as a whole is a bit of a hotchpotch, inevitably, and some extracts fade out rather abruptly. The sound is rather dry, too, which doesn’t always flatter Botha’s focused sound; you don’t get much sense of its size or ability to project. But you’re left in no doubt as to what a terrific instrument it was, what a fine, intelligent artist Botha was, and how much he is going to be missed.