Her folksongs remain my favourite of her recordings, not least because it is when she sings in English that one can understand so well the quality of her English voice. She is peerless in "Das Lied von der Erde", ravishing in the Brahms Alto Rhapsody, and stunning in Handel and Bach: but there remains something almost incomprehensibly good about her singing "My Boy Willie," "Come you not from Newcastle" or "O Waly, Waly". Contraltos are out of fashion these days, for reasons I find incomprehensible; so when one hears Ferrier one does not just hear supreme artistry and musicianship, one hears something that very distinctly has a period feel. Although the recording is slightly distorted, her account of "Land of Hope and Glory" from Elgar's Coronation Ode, which she sang under Barbirolli's baton at the reopening of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1951, puts Ferrier very much in her context, and places her as the greatest British voice of the period.

By 1942 Ferrier was undertaking regular professional engagements, but her career    really flourished after 1945, with the cultural renaissance in Britain after the war. She was taken up by Benjamin Britten, her almost exact contemporary, whose English folksong arrangements she sang so perfectly. Ferrier became a prized part of the Aldeburgh set; one of the great "what ifs" is what Britten might have written for her throughout the 1950s and '60s had she survived. Part of her attraction to the public was her down-to-earth take on life; there was nothing of the diva about her. When visited on her sickbed in 1953 and told that Britten and his partner Peter Pears were moving house, she wondered whether the new menage would be called "Homo Sweet Homo". She could not abide 12-tone music, which she pungently described as "three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated".

Ferrier remains a unique example of the English voice of her age: but to my ear there was a golden age of singing that lasted really from the 1920s to the 1960s, and which now seems hopelessly old-fashioned and is dismissed as a result. It starts for me with Steuart Wilson and Heddle Nash, continues with Isobel Baillie and Astra Desmond, goes through Ferrier to John Cameron, Jennifer Vyvyan and Norma Procter, and is rounded off by John Shirley-Quirk (a male voice with a uniqueness approaching Ferrier's) and Janet Baker. Many of their recordings remain in the catalogue: they tend to be overlooked by those who love to have their "fi" high, and those who find the mid-20th century mode of singing arch or mannered.