I first heard John Carol Case perform when he gave a recital of English songs at the first Portsmouth festival in 1971. It was immediately clear to everyone who heard him that John was a remarkable artist, whose outstanding voice and highly sensitive treatment of texts were fully comparable with the finest lieder singers of the age.
He visited the festival again the following year to sing a Bach cantata and the Fauré Requiem with us, and in 1973 performed with me the greatest of all song-cycles, Schubert's Winterreise. In that year he also sang Vaughan Williams's Dona Nobis Pacem, and in 1974 repeated that work, shortly after recording it with Sir Adrian Boult, on the Portsmouth Festival Choir's visit to Duisburg in Germany, in what we afterwards learned was the first performance of the work in that country.
He decided to retire – inexplicably to us all – in 1976, when he was still only just over 50, his voice as fine as ever, and gave his last recital with me. The programme included three of Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, and was notable, above all, for his masterly performance of RVW's Songs of Travel.