Word: fischer-dieskau
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...help quiet his preperformance jitters and tune up his musical perception, German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau packs his luggage with a few tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his audiences the most moving performances of German lieder to be heard...
Concert-Tour Legend. At 33, Fischer-Dieskau has become a concert-tour legend in Europe and the U.S.: almost singlehanded, he has accounted for the postwar popularity of the German art song. On his U.S. tours, he has held audiences rapt through the whole of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise and through the complete Schumann Dichterliebe. He has reached an even wider public through his 40-odd LP recordings, including Hugo Wolf's 16 Songs, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, Brahms's German Requiem, albums of Mahler songs...
...Fischer-Dieskau is also one of the most consistently popular opera singers in Germany; aided by an imposing 6-ft. 2-in. figure, he has shaped a number of moving characterizations, e.g., Wolfram in Tannhäuser. Sir John Falstaff, and the title role in Busoni's Doktor Faustus. Even more surprising than the scope of his success is the fact that he had no early singing experience: he took his first voice lesson when he was 16, had scarcely started to sing professionally when he was drafted into the German army. As an American prisoner...
...where castrati singers were frowned upon.) Of the two versions, Epic's (in French) is more authentic historically, but less effective, chiefly because Canadian Tenor Leopold Simoneau's silver-hued voice seems less moving in the role of the suffering Orpheus than the lyric baritone of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, imaginatively cast by Decca in its German-language version. The supporting casts in both albums are excellent: Sopranos Suzanne Danco and Pierette Alarie (Epic), Maria Stader and Rita Streich (Decca). Despite the good singing, the recordings suffer from the opera's basic structural fault. Groundbreaker though...
...recording yet to appear of the 165-year-old masterpiece. Soprano Maria Stader makes Pamina a joy to the ear; Rita Streich is awesomely secure in the Queen of the Night's sky-high aerobatics, while the two leading men, Tenor Ernst Häfliger and Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, use their handsome voices with distinction...