How they did love him in Vienna! And with good reason. As Ewald Marld recounts in his excellent accompanying essay, Nicolai Ghiaurov was with them for 36 years, giving 276 performances in 12 roles. It’s the quality of the applause that tells: not a ‘set’ ovation but a genuine outburst, as though, having known he was going to be good, they were still amazed to find yet again that he was that good. And the enthusiasm is surely fully merited in all these excerpts.

We hear him first, fresh-voiced and magnificent in even-toned sonority as Fiesco in his prologue to Simon Boccanegra. Then comes the complete triumph in one of his great roles, the King in Don Carlos: aristocratic in vocal method as in emotional restraint. With the Macbeth of 1980, the voice we knew in London, with its accretion of upper harmonies (or maybe just wear), becomes more recognisable; still a noble instrument unmatched by any other at the time. The latest of the recordings, Eugene Onegin in 1998, shows how much remained even in his last years. And there is still the Boris Godunov, the most famous role of all, caught in 1976, when the Rimsky version was still permitted, he (with Mark Reisen) among the most scrupulously musical of its exponents, yet nearer to Chaliapin than commonly acknowledged.

His was the most beautiful of bass voices heard (in my experience) since the Second World War. He was not, to my mind, Christoff’s equal in the creation of character or in vocal magnetism; even in these excerpts, fine as they are, we are aware of limitations in the range of his expressiveness. But the magnificence is unmistakable, and is more persuasively exhibited here, I would say, than any of his other collections on disc.