Whatever else you do, you must acquire this disc if you value great singing. The performance of Strauss's Four Last Songs is unquestionably the most natural, most sincere, most beautiful ever to have been recorded, and we have that only courtesy of Swedish Radio. Never on any commercial or 'private' recording have I heard the lovely quality of Jurinac's voice as I recall it in the theatre or concert hall, caught as it is here. And when you come to think of it the voice might have been made for this music. The inner glow, the spirituality, the sheer ease of the singing are quite remarkable. Jurinac fills the big climaxes of the third and fourth songs with the kind of rapt, emotional intensity they deserve and catches the autumnal regrets of all four songs unerringly, yet it is all done without any kind of effort, any suggestions of 'giving a performance'. To add to one's pleasure she is supported by that great Strauss conductor Fritz Busch, who phrases the music without any of the portentousness of some of his successors and persuades the strings of the Stockholm orchestra to play with real warmth and sheen. Without doubt, now that this reading is commercially available it should become one of the most sought after of vocal discs, and thus all Keith Hardwick's hard work on the original tapes, which were noisy, will be amply rewarded.
Of course, the musical rapport of Jurinac and Busch began at Glyndebourne, and here we have the extracts from the two operas they performed and recorded together there. As llia (Idomeneo) and Fiordiligi (Cosi) Jurinac has not been surpassed and some of the radiance of her portrayals is caught here. However, the voice doesn't sound quite as full as in the Strauss songs and the Cosi excerpts suffer from early tape print-through. Nevertheless, the command of legato and runs is special, and she catches all the emotional turmoil of Ilia's opening aria.
Her performances of the Smetana and Tchaikovsky items, all sung in German, show again the freshness and ardour of her approach. The Lullaby from The Kiss, previously unissued, is gently and sweetly done. The fullness of her tone can be appreciated in Joan of Arc's farewell, but the most exciting performance is Lisa's Third Act suicide aria from The Queen of Spades discovered for the Gramophone Award-winning Vol. 4 of The Record Of Singing'' (4/89). In this, as in the Strauss, we can hear the immediacy of Jurinac's singing, her ability to make the tone soar effortlessly, and her matchless way of knitting words and music into a seamless whole. Also notable here, and in her Marenka (The Bartered Bride) is the plangent touch in her singing, undoubtedly part of her Slavic upbringing. This is a superb issue, all 78 minutes of it.'