Irmgard Seefried: Recordings 1944-67 – review

Seefried/Werba/Various orchestras/Ludwig/Böhm/Karajan/Furtwängler
(Orfeo D'or)

UK release dates can sometimes be wayward, and the appearance of this glorious set is a bit behind schedule. It marks the 25th anniversary, in November last year, of the death of the German soprano Irmgard Seefried. One of the finest post-war singers, she was noted for her coolly sexy, unmistakable tone, and remarkable interpretative immediacy. Drawing on German and Austrian radio archives, the set magisterially surveys her career. A clutch of broadcasts from 1944 find her as a young principal at the Staatsoper in Nazi-occupied Vienna. They include chunks of the famous Ariadne auf Naxos, conducted by Karl Böhm, in which she earned Strauss's approval as the most touchingly impulsive of Composers, and the last 20 minutes of Puccini's Suor Angelica, under Leopold Ludwig, in which her emotional veracity is genuinely unnerving.

The late 40s and 1950s marked her emergence as one of the great Mozartians. We hear her at Salzburg in 1951 turning Pamina's Ach Ich Fühl's into a grand, tragic statement for Wilhelm Furtwängler, and she makes a fiery yet vulnerable Fiordiligi for Karl Böhm in 1956. Contrasting extracts from Le Nozze di Figaro under Karajan (1947) and Furtwängler (1953), show how her Susanna became more emotionally complex with time. Much of the operatic material has been heard before.

There are, however, two discs' worth of first releases of several live lieder recitals recorded between 1951 and 1958, all with her regular accompanist Erik Werba, together with a cabaret evening she recorded for German radio in 1967. The latter has bags of charm, though purists may object to her singing French chansons in German. As a lieder singer, however, she has been matched by few, and there's a freshness to many of these performances that make them preferable to her studio versions, superb though they are. She's wonderfully vivid in Schubert, rapt and introverted in Schumann, and unusually sexy in Brahms. There are a few flaws of omission: no songs by Strauss or Wolf; nothing of her Zerlina in Don Giovanni or her Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, roles in which she has probably never been bettered. But all the same, this is a wonderful tribute – essential listening if you already love her work, and the perfect introduction to it if you don't.

Contributor

Tim Ashley

The GuardianTramp

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