The riches of YouTube never cease to amaze me! I was chatting to a friend recently and telling him I was going to meet the Dutch soprano Elly Ameling and we started swapping favourites: Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’, Poulenc’s ‘C’est ainsi, que tu es’, Bach’s Wedding Cantata, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, and so on. ‘What a shame she never recorded Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs,’ I found myself saying, and just out of curiosity typed ‘Ameling Strauss Four Last Songs’ into Google. The reward? Not one but two performances, one of which – with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Wolfgang Sawallisch, recorded live in 1982 – that would surely merit inclusion among the finest versions of these heavenly songs ever recorded.

Elly Ameling’s voice has accompanied me for as long as I can remember, and she appears on so many recordings that introduced me to the great works of the repertoire. Whether in German or French, her bright, focused, open-throated soprano led the way to so many discoveries from JS Bach to Frank Martin and so much in between. The personality that shines through her numerous recordings, particularly of song, and did so too in concert (I only heard her live once) is exactly that of the person I spent a few hours with in Leeds where she is the President of Leeds Song (né Leeds Lieder). She was in the city for a few days to give a couple of masterclasses, attend some concerts and no doubt charm many of the festival’s loyal patrons. I took the train up on the first Sunday in April, a near perfect spring day, and caught the last hour of her masterclass before joining her for lunch and a chat afterwards. At 92, she is a miracle: vivacious, funny, perceptive, and still evidently able to derive enormous joy from music. She listens to the radio and attends concerts, and is impressively plugged in when it comes to the younger generations of singers (she spoke appreciatively of the German baritone Benjamin Appl whom she’d recently heard in Amsterdam). And, absolutely up-to-date, she has strong views about the dangers of AI and its potential misuse.

There was one question I had to ask, and the minute I started she knew exactly what I was going to say. ‘You’re going to ask me about why I didn’t sing opera,’ she said. ‘Well, there were various reasons, of course. As a Dutch girl who started singing after the war, there was no operatic history in my country. So it didn’t really even strike my mind. Also at that time the Dutch were a modest people. We were lucky to have survived the war – we got through it and we came out the other side. Maybe that brings a kind of humility that you don’t feel ready to go out and say, “Look at me!”. Also I’m a little bit of a perfectionist and having a father who was a watch- and clock-maker, working with all these small objects, perhaps that made an impression on me, even though I never really knew him well as he died very early in my life. Big gestures are not my thing. A clockmaker has no big gestures. That’s how I think about it myself. And my mother always sang and I heard her virtually from my birth. And then, why would you want to sing your 121st Susanna? And I knew that I could do things with art song that other people didn’t see.’ Opera’s loss was song’s gain, though Ameling does tell me that she sang the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust at the Concertgebouw with Bernard Haitink conducting. ‘I was very young and, if I say so myself, it’s really rather good! I’ll certainly stand by it!’ You can hear it on YouTube – and she’s not wrong!

During her masterclass – for which Ameling found a perfect balance of encouragement and practical, constructive criticism, elevated with a charm and humour, that made everyone feel at ease – she showed an attention to detail and a forensic approach to the text that clearly underpinned her own interpretations (where the art that conceals art never impeded the direct relationship with her audiences – both in concert and on record). And she paid almost as much attention to the piano as to the singer. ‘For me, working with the pianist – and I like that the word “accompanist” has fallen out of fashion – was like a dance. Sometimes I’d lead, sometimes he’d lead but it was always a partnership.’ And she worked with some of the finest – Dalton Baldwin, Jörg Demus, Rudolf Jansen and Gerald Moore among them. And she was full of praise for Joseph Middleton who directs the Leeds Song festival. ‘It’s fantastic what he does. He sticks to the real performance and presentation of art song.’ I tell her that one of the qualities that also strikes me when I listen to her sing is joy. ‘I was never really nervous. There was some tension, like the horse before the jump. But we call that energy, not tension. I was not nervous on stage because you are there to utter what is inside you. You have built it all up, and you’re going to give it out now and share with the audience. That’s what I sometimes murmured, especially on days when you’re not in such good voice. (And we can’t be on top form every single day – our bodies are different from day to day.) So I said to myself, “Hello, people, come with me, let’s share it together”.’

Her generosity of spirit shone through in her comments about her colleagues: in her masterclass she spoke with wonder at Kathleen Ferrier’s ability to touch the heart. She admires Janet Baker, whom she often sang alongside, and loved the way she sang, and spoke, English, as well as the poise of her stage presence. She would also advise singers to listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, especially for his way with words, though ever the perfectionist she pointed out that he’d sometimes lose the final ‘n’ on words! (A quick sample of his recordings revealed that she is absolutely right!)

For the Leeds masterclass I attended, Elly Ameling’s last singer was a soprano who offered a couple of Hugo Wolf songs and ‘La lune blanche’ from Fauré’s La bonne chanson. Ameling opted for the Fauré and it was fascinating not only to get an insight into how she approached the song, but to hear the difference in the performance after her sage advice had been absorbed. ‘I always say that at 92 I can no longer sing, but as long I can still speak I shall talk about song. And I always say that the most important thing any singer, indeed any artist, can have is imagination.’ And listening to Ameling’s own recording of the song is to be amazed at the detail she brings, yet all done with the lightest of touches, one that simply doesn’t draw attention to itself. Her French has always been faultless but she also seemed to find that intangible French vocal quality when she sang the language. A personal favourite is her album ‘Soirée Française’ that came out from Philips in 1987, and looking back at Alan Blyth’s review I’m pleased to see that he commented that ‘These days Elly Ameling can be relied on to give us more interesting programmes on record than any of her contemporaries’. In a programme of real gems which, she tells me, she programmed herself, she gives us Honegger’s Trois chansons de la Petite Sirène – quite breathtakingly beautiful and sung with exquisite control and colour. When I ask her about working with the great French baryton-martin and muse of Francis Poulenc, Pierre Bernac, she points out that it was only for a handful of afternoons but added that ‘there’s a Dutch expression: “Een goed verstaander heeft maar een half woord nodig.” “A good understander” – that’s not a good word, of course – “only needs half a word.” With Bernac – and Dalton Baldwin was also listening to those classes – he was always emphasising “La ligne”, the line, and it’s something I always remembered. And I think that’s the main thing for everybody’s musicality to understand: listen to and understand what is told to you. And as I said this morning to the students, very often it’s vital to have both a logical understanding, but also to have an image with it.’

Another of YouTube’s many Ameling treasures is a series of ‘Musings’ that she has filmed in which she discusses songs and how a student might approach them. Again, they show the detail she applied to her interpretations, and yet there is never anything even vaguely studied about the results – they always sounded fresh and spontaneous.

For a singer whose career started in the mid-1950s, she witnessed a changing musical landscape that saw the approach to Baroque music go from the Big Band approach of, say, both Eugen Jochum and Ernest Ansermet (with both of whom she performed Bach), via the more ‘chamber-size’ style of Karl Münchinger, Raymond Leppard and Neville Marriner, to working with the period instruments of Collegium Aureum, or collaborating with Jörg Demus on a fortepiano. ‘Every three weeks there seemed to be a new approach,’ she laughed. ‘In the 1980s I worked with Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He’d come to Amsterdam quite often to do the St Matthew Passion, but we did the St John Passion. I didn’t know what was going to happen – he seemed to be rather modern – so I took three tempos, including a kind of Mengelberg speed, and also one that was much quicker, and studied them all so that the muscles could get accustomed to them. And then came the first rehearsal with the orchestra, and he took exactly the tempo that I like, which was fairly slow. So he wasn’t that modern – he was very moderate. That was my experience.’ It was about that time that Ameling called it a day on performing Bach and concentrated entirely on art song.

For a huge number of people, even though Ameling toured extensively – she has a huge following in Japan – her voice will be best known from her vast recorded catalogue. Did she enjoy the recording process? By way of an answer she gave me an anecdote. ‘Jörg Demus and I were recording Schubert’s Gretchen am Sprinnrade. We’d done it about five or six times. I thought it was all right. We listened in between and he said, “Can we do it again?” I said give me an audience. I can’t keep doing this surprise, and this climax on “Kuss” six times over – I have no audience! And Jörg answered, “Aber Elly” – in his strong Viennese accent – “Ich bin dein dankbarster Zuhörer – “But Elly, I’m your most grateful listener.” That helped and I’ve never forgotten it.’

Before we part I ask her about her Great American Songbook album, ‘Sentimental me’, that came out in 1985 during a period when many operatic stars were ‘crossing over’, not always to great effect! She laughs and modestly says that ‘Some of them are successes. The one I like is [Ellington’s] “In a sentimental mood”.’ These classics by Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Sondheim and others done with great charm, partnered by piano and bass. But it’s just one in a discography that never received anything other than a glowing review.