Not just the ticket with his autograph, in fact, but - more important - the intense memory of hearing him sing the most perfect of Donizetti 'Una furtiva lagrima's at the age of 72. Though there's no date, it must have been 1997. The researcher at BBC Radio 3's In Tune seemed rather pleased to have hit on that memory when she rang me up yesterday afternoon - I even took the ticket straight off the CD shelves in front of me to look at it while we spoke. My phone chat with the delightful Sarah Walker is here on the iPlayer for the next 28 days (at 40m15s), and there's an excerpt in a soundclip, presumably there in perpetuity, which they put up pronto after the live broadcast. Image below from the Warner archive.
Had there been longer I might also have mentioned how he was on one of the very first opera LP sets I borrowed as a, maybe, 10 year old from Sutton Music Library. I'll be honest and say I was attracted by the cover, which showed Reri Grist's Gilda looking at Cornell MacNeil's stricken Rigoletto in a mockup of a renaissance room with bunches of fruit on the table (if memory serves). Gedda, of course, was Verdi's Duke of Mantua on the LP set.
Wish I'd seen Gedda on stage (only caught the concert and later the Bernstein Barbican performance of Candide in which the veteran NG played three small roles). Searching YouTube as well as CDs on the shelves, I found this interesting: two performances of Lensky's aria from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. The first - the one played, I believe on In Tune - was made when Gedda was 28, and is soft and intimate
while the second is much fuller, very stylish albeit matched to a poor quality and rather pointless film in which he's miming badly and seems to be addressing Zaretsky as the one he's saying farewell to rather than Olga.
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