What television channel today would dare to put out a regular live programme in which singer and accompanist give an unadorned Lieder recital? Yet in the late 1950s and early ’60s that was just what Gerald Moore did for the BBC. This DVD, although mostly devoted to Teresa Berganza, has as a bonus Moore accompanying Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hans Hotter, Julius Patzak and Christa Ludwig. The programme opens with Berganza in 1960, aged 25, singing Falla’s Siete canciones populares españolas. She nearly always included at least some of these in her recitals. Here, and throughout, she is in pristine voice. For the studio, there are just three camera angles, full-length, half-length, and then some well-chosen close-ups of the singer’s face and Moore’s hands. At the end they smile and say a shy little ‘Goodnight’.

At the Aix Festival a few years later, Berganza has grown up. In a white silk strapless evening gown, she has become a confident diva. Although she was always classified as a mezzo,in the first of the Montsalvatge songs, her voice is poised in the soprano register. The quality of the film here is fuzzy and the camerawork less accomplished. However, this is Berganza very much as one remembers her. With the added stimulus of an audience, her facial expressions and communication seem spontaneous – she isn’t worrying about the camera. There is applause after each song, and in that favourite encore, ‘Canción de cuna para dormir a un negrito’, the camera stays firmly focused on her face and one can follow each line and sense her enjoyment of the relaxed lullaby. Then, in the first of the three Obradors songs, she acts the coquette, with little side glances at the audience. Berganza had a subtle sense of comedy and pathos. She is in magnificent form in this Aix concert: the security of line, tone and her use of restrained gestures are admirable throughout. Felix Lavilla, her husband and regular accompanist, provides the other half of the story. Each of these Spanish songs is a duet for singer and piano. The two items recorded a few days later, Schubert’s ‘Die Post’ and the unusual Donizetti concert aria, show Berganza in unfamiliarrepertory. The Donizetti, especially, isinteresting, yet I don’t think she ever appeared in one of his operas.

Sadly, the picture quality of the first Paris orchestral concert is variable, hazy in long-shot, not so bad in close up. The simplicity and sweetness of her expression in the first part of Cenerentola’s big scene is lovely, then the final rondo brings a triumphant grin. The conductor is Eugen Jochum, who I daresay was more at home in the Mozart arias that follow. The most interesting item is the concert aria K578, Alma grande e nobil core, and here there is adramatic bite that makes a contrast with the two Cherubino arias. Finally, by 1967 – still in black-and-white but much better quality – Berganza has changed her image somewhat, with a more elaborate coiffure and heavier make-up. ‘Parto, parto’, a favourite aria of hers – she recorded the role of Sesto for the first time with Kertész at about the same date (Decca, 5/91) – makes a fine ending to this valuable sequence. It really is an advantage to see and hear Berganza: she lives each part, each poem.

In the bonus tracks, both Julius Patzak and Hans Hotter look rather uncomfortable in front of the camera, though Patzak relaxes a little towards the end of the aria from Johann Strauss’s Der lustige Krieg. That famous Viennese charm needed a theatre and an audience. Fischer-Dieskau was probably already well-used to television in 1959: it’s hard to believe there aren’t lots of other films of him with Moore, but it’s good to have this example. Christa Ludwig, too, seems to understand the technique for camera, and the four songs by different composers are an object lesson in varying mood and tone. The texts of all the songs are printed in the accompanying booklet, and the translations are very efficiently added as subtitles.