Despite the title, this is not “the very best” of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Disc 1, focusing on lieder, arguably contains tracks that could contend for such a sobriquet, but Disc 2, focused on operatic arias, is a disaster. Fischer-Dieskau was the most influential lieder singer of his generation, but I find his mannered style, with its excessive emphasis on the text to the detriment of the musical line, to be a baleful influence. His mannerisms became more pronounced with time as the lyric baritone voice lost its freshness. In the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the songs here were recorded, he came closest to balancing textual and musical values.
The set begins with 14 Schubert songs, including five from a 1962 Die schöne Müllerin with pianist Gerald Moore, who accompanies all of the lieder selections here. Fischer-Dieskau’s Schubert was admired at the time and it still holds up, as we can hear in early selections such as the gorgeous 1958 “Ständchen” and an equally admirable “Du bist die Ruh'” from 1952. But the earliest of all, a 1951 “Erlkönig”, misfires. It’s treated more as a melodrama than a song, and the depiction of the three characters is ill-defined. Some of the songs by Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss are done quite beautifully, but others are not. Again, earlier generally equates with better, as we can hear in the Wolf set, where the four songs from 1958 are a bit more direct than the overblown “Auch kleine Dinge” from a decade later. The disc ends with “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, conducted by George Szell.
Disc 2 opens with Fischer-Dieskau in his hectoring mode, aspirating his way through “Grosser Herr, o starker König” from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio–though he’s more comfortable in the next track, that same work’s “Erlaucht auch meine finstre Sinnen”. Among those “finstre Sinnen” must surely be Fischer-Dieskau’s odd attempts to sing Verdi, a composer to whom he is totally unsuited in voice or style. Surely, his “Il balen” more properly belongs in a “The Very Worst of …” series, a model of how not to sing Verdi. I might understand why EMI would select one of Fischer-Dieskau’s Verdi arias if only to make a pass at demonstrating his range–but six of them? Each is worse than the last, capped by a “Si pel ciel” in which the Otello, the very worthy James McCracken, and Fischer-Dieskau’s Iago tend to go their own ways.
The Verdi mess is preceded by a pair of Wagner arias, mementos of roles Fischer-Dieskau never sang in the theatre. “Die Frist ist um” from The Flying Dutchman is passable, though his voice has neither the resonance nor the low notes–but Wotan’s “Leb’wohl” is awful, every phrase teased, stretched, pulled, and deconstructed. EMI cleverly prints the track information pages of the booklet in tiny type set on a brown background, so dates are unreadable without a powerful microscope.
