My earliest memory of the legendary tenor Jon Vickers has remained blazingly vividly with me for 61 years now, wholly undiminished with time – and most especially as I had received such a shock when he sang for the first time in the performance of February 27th 1961. This was the second night of a new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, a very auspicious event: making his debut there not only as conductor but also stage director was another legendary artist, Otto Klemperer, and the cast included great luminaries Sena Jurinac as Leonore alias Fidelio (her first time in the role), Gottlob Frick as Rocco, and Hans Hotter as Don Pizarro. The young but already world famous Jon Vickers was singing Florestan and performing with the formidable and fearsome Klemperer for the first time. As just an early adolescent teenager, I was immensely fortunate to be there, courtesy of my devoted parents who had lovingly been introducing me to operas and concerts for a few years by then. I remember my father saying “there’s a brilliantly gifted young tenor who’ll be singing tonight, he’s called Jon Vickers; he’s made a great name for himself”. As I was new to this particular opera, in other words wholly ignorant about it, by the interval I was wondering if this great young talent was going to appear. “Just wait” my father said. Three and a half minutes after the start of the second act, the curtain rose on the darkest and barest of dungeons – and suddenly a volcanic cry rang through the theatre: “Gott! welch’ Dunkel hier!” (“God! What darkness here!”). To me it sounds just as startling today in the recording of the first night performance three nights earlier that the late lamented Stewart Brown brought out on his justly extolled Testament label (SBT 21328) – and it isn’t just the titanic volume and size of the voice: the sustained intensity has a visceral dramatic presence borne equally out of gripping emotional power and tearing word colour. Straight away it is a voice of immense courage and faith in the face of starvation and destruction – and within seconds, in a spellbinding near whisper, it is a voice of desperate exhaustion close to death: “O grauenvolle Stille!” (“What terrifying silence”). Such a range, in just a blink of time.