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This busy tenor established his reputation early as a reliable artist in Mozart and Bach. With a voice less sensuous than those of Léopold Simoneau or Anton Dermota, he nonetheless was frequently engaged for stage performances, concert work, and recordings. Eventually, he ventured as far into a heavier repertory as Walter von Stolzing, a role he sang at the Bayreuth Festival. Kmentt's Metropolitan Opera debut -- in a speaking role -- awaited the new millennium, but still brought encomiums from audiences and the press. First intending to pursue a career as a pianist, Kmentt later studied singing at the Vienna Academy of Music with Hans Duhan, Elisabeth Rado, and Adolf Vogel. At that time, he was selected to tour Belgium and the Netherlands with a student opera ensemble that included two singers who would later achieve considerable fame: tenor Fritz Uhl and bass baritone Walter Berry. Kmentt's formal debut took place in 1950 with a performance in Vienna of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 conducted by Karl Böhm. In 1951, he made his professional stage debut singing in a Wiener Volksoper production of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges. The year following, Kmentt became a member of the Wiener Staatsoper. For the first three years of his tenure, the company performed at the Theater an der Wien while awaiting reconstruction of the company's own house. For the reopening of the Staatsoper in 1955, Kmentt was cast as Jacquino in Fidelio, sharing the stage with such luminaries as Martha Mödl, Anton Dermota, and Ludwig Weber. That same year, he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival singing Dandini in Pfitzner's Palestrina. Mozart served for his introduction to La Scala in 1968 when he sang the title role in Idomeneo. Kmentt made his debut at Bayreuth the same year, singing Walter in Die Meistersinger. During the years of his prime, he also appeared frequently in operetta. When Kmentt gradually relinquished leading roles, he moved into comprimario parts, such as the Major-Domo in Der Rosenkavalier. Ironically, it was another Major-Domo, this one in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, who finally brought Kmentt to the Metropolitan Opera in spring 2001. Among Kmentt's roles captured in recording are the tenor part in Bach's St. Matthew Passion under Møgens Wöldike, his Froh under Solti, and his Ferrando with Böhm, taped live at La Scala.

Bass Walter Berry grew, by measured and steady advancement, into one of the leading artists of his time. Beginning at the Vienna Staatsoper at the early age of 21, he progressed through the major Mozart baritone and bass roles to such weightier challenges as Beethoven's Pizarro and Wagner's Kurwenal, Telramund, and even Wotan. He was able to transmute the sunny, rounded, very Viennese sound of his wide-ranging instrument into something more potent, more incisive for his Wagner roles and he became one of the most celebrated Wozzecks of his day. His musicianship and sturdy voice made him a welcome guest at many of the world's leading opera venues and he was regarded as an affecting recitalist as well.

Originally intending to pursue a career in engineering, Berry switched to vocal study and trained with Hermann Gallos at the Vienna Musical Academy. He made his debut as a soloist in Honegger's Jeanne-d'Arc and soon thereafter joined the Staatsoper. As early as 1953, he was singing Masetto at Salzburg, the first of an outstanding gallery of Mozart characterizations. At the festival, he also participated in the premieres of Gottfried von Einem's Prozess (1953), Rolf Leibermann's Penelope (1954), and Werner Egk's Irische Legende (1954).

America heard Berry for the first time when he presented his genial Mozart Figaro at Chicago's Lyric Opera in 1957. Three years later, he returned to Chicago as part of a more stellar cast (Schwarzkopf, Streich, his then-wife Christa Ludwig, and Eberhard Wächter) to offer a Figaro unchallenged by any other than Cesare Siepi's. Berry subsequently sang Leporello, Don Alfonso, Fernando (Fidelio), and Baron Ochs in Chicago.

On October 2, 1966, Berry made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in a production of Strauss' Die Frau Ohne Schatten conducted by Karl Böhm. Together with James King's Emperor, Leonie Rysanek's Empress and Christa Ludwig's Dyer's Wife, Berry's Barak was hailed as a magnificent accomplishment and an immense popular success. A live recording with that same quartet of principals, captured in Salzburg in 1974, reveals each singer performing at such a pitch of vocal and interpretive splendor as to have made the collaboration legendary. Although his marriage to Ludwig had ended in 1971, Berry was still the partner of choice for the mezzo-soprano's intense and soaring Dyer's Wife. Berry made his Covent Garden debut as Barak in 1976 and sang the role in San Francisco that same year.

Berry's increasingly powerful voice tended toward the lower end of bass-baritone spectrum and his Baron Ochs managed the bottommost notes with authority. His recording with Bernstein is both substantially sung and interpreted with Viennese lightness. Berry had accumulated an extensive discography by the time of his death, remaining in good voice until the very end of his life (he participated in a Renée Fleming Strauss recital shortly before his death). His hearty and endearing Papageno was recorded twice. His Pizarro in the 1961 Klemperer recording of Fidelio, despite the conductor's slow pacing, served notice that his was an art destined for more than Mozart. His singing of the bass arias in Klemperer's recording of Bach's St. Matthew Passion is fluent and deeply felt, notwithstanding, once again, some glacial tempi.

Though never quite viewed as a star personality, Berry crafted his own unique spot among the great singers who reigned in the twentieth century's second half.

One of the most distinguished Bach tenors of the twentieth century, Kurt Equiluz began his singing career as soloist with the Vienna Boys Choir. After studies in music theory, harp, and singing at the Austrian State Academy for Music and Art in Vienna, he won several major competitions, including the International Singing Competition in England (1947-1948) and the Vienna Mozart Competition (1949). He joined the Vienna State Opera Chorus in 1950 and went on to distinguish himself in 69 different roles, including Pedrillo in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Curzio in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Scaramuccio in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, Balthasar Zorn in the Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Spoletta in Puccini's Tosca, Kaiser Altoum in Puccini's Turandot, Monostatos in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, and Rossillon in Léhar's Lustigen Witwe. In 1987, he gave his final performance on the opera stage in Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide. With a vocal style best suited to oratorio and lieder, his reputation largely rests on his performances in the complete cycle of Bach cantatas and Passions directed by Harnoncourt and Leonhardt. In 1971, Equiluz was was appointed as professor in Musikhochschule of Graz, and in 1982 as professor at the Wiener Musikakademie. Kurt Equiluz died on June 20, 2022 at the age of 93.