Grummer made all too few records. Presumably, with Schwarzkopf as EMI’s resident soprano, Grummer could only be offered roles outside her colleague’s repertory. Thus we have her complete Donna Anna, Agathe, Eva, Elsa, Elisabeth and Hansel – and the few solo items happily restored to circulation on this issue (plus her contributions to some choral recordings). Her only role in Verdi was Desdemona, and that’s remembered here in the love duet with Schock, and the character’s Act 4 Willow Song and Ave Maria. Although Grummer sings in German, she uses the text to such advantage in portraying first Desdemona’s adoring love for her General, then her sense of apprehension, that one almost welcomes the vernacular. These items display to perfection the outgoing, unsophisticated style that so endeared Grummer to her audiences, a style in which sincerity and musicality were the core of the matter. The tone flows so easily, the phrasing is so broad, the words are placed so meaningfully on the tone.
Her Lieder evinced just the same advantages. I remember once late in her career (1967), her coming on to the stage of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with her handbag which she placed firmly on the piano lid, thus indicating there were to be no prima donna antics or looking holy in the cause of art; Grummer just got down to the business of conveying her love for the songs to an audience – as she did then and on this 1958 recital with Gerald Moore as a wonderful support. Most of the familiar songs by Schubert emerge spontaneously, new-minted, smilingly or sadly as the poem dictates, and in the one rarity, Vor meiner Wiege, the single line “Sie sang mir von Rosen und Engeln vor” (“She sang to me of roses and angels”) expresses unerringly simple belief and a sense of loss.
In Brahms the Innigkeit of Das Madchen and the melancholy of Madchenlied are beautifully contrasted. Few of her contemporaries – Seefried perhaps – or her successors conveyed such seemingly artless, heartfelt simplicity. The earlier recordings of Solveig’s solos, again in German (Grummer knew the benefits of staying with her own tongue), show the same characteristics. The transfers, and the original recordings, admirably catch her unmistakable sound.'