This live recital from London’s Royal Festival Hall in February, 1970, catches Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in exceptionally fine voice–if not quite in his prime. The qualities that made him a success–the beautifully smooth high baritone and the imaginative, authoritative way with the text–are here in abundance. The Wayfarer songs, with a piano accompaniment affectionately rendered by Karl Engel–call on Fischer-Dieskau to explore both extremes of his range, which he does with martial tone in the lower, and a smooth crooning style in the higher. This technique makes for some truly beautiful moments in the Rückert lieder, especially “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”. Those listeners put off by Fischer-Dieskau’s self-conscious (some would say arrogant), declamatory style won’t find any comfort in this concert, for he displays it throughout. Still, his performing style here is much preferable to that of his later recordings, such as the Kleiber Tristan und Isolde, or the Mahler songs with Mehta, where it had degenerated into a mannered barking. The less commonly programmed Jugendzeit lieder find Fischer-Dieskau displaying the same qualities, positive and negative, as he shows in the other works. The BBC recording sets the piano in the distance, with up-close miking of the singer that adds a bit of harshness to his dynamic outbursts.
