The first performance of Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder would have been a historic event with a much less eminent soloist and conductor than Flagstad and Furtwangler; to have it (or, as I believe, the rehearsal) on record at all is some privilege. The great Wagnerian soprano was in her 55th year, and, though these songs need maturity in their singing, they make unseasonable demands upon a singer of that age. For a Brunnhilde voice, one might think, the first song, ‘Fruhling’, is unsuitable if not impossible; yet Flagstad (ducking the single high B) copes marvellously well, wondrously indeed at the phrase ‘Du kennst mich wieder’. Best of all is the last of the four, ‘Im Abendrot’, where the noble instrument matches the solemn glow of words and music. The drawback – as, to their credit, the editors of the present record do not fail to point out – is the quality of recording. Worst, and washing in waves of indeterminate pitch, is the opening of the first song; and what is not pointed out is that at the performance itself it was not ‘Fruhling’ but ‘Beim Schlafengeh’n’, the third song, that was given first. It was later in the year that the songs were published, in the order presently accepted.
The broadcast concerts from San Francisco are preserved in much better sound. The Wagner programme of 1949 took place in the thick of a nasty campaign by sections of the press and public which made Flagstad’s post-war return to the USA an anxious time. Her singing gives no hint of that, culminating in a Liebestod which begins with movingly characteristic inflections (on the word ‘lachelt’ for instance) and grows like a great floodtide. The other orchestral songs of Strauss, sung in 1950, are also fine, with the ‘Allerseelen’ recalling very closely the voice many of us came to know first through a recording of that same song 15 years earlier.
A bonus is the spoken part of Flagstad’s Desert Island Discs, the choice of records prompting special compliments to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Jussi Bjorling, the principal pleasure being the sound of that rich contralto speaking-voice. Set Svanholm’s contribution to the Wagner concert is workmanlike but hardly attractive. Little care and expenditure would seem to have been given to the disc’s presentation, which provides an added reason for drawing attention to the third volume of the Flagstad edition on Simax (1/97), which in three discs covers this period of her career much more fully and includes the Vier letzte Lieder in better sound.'