Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Luigi Cherubini: Medea (1957/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:58:51 minutes | 2,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

Medea is one of the roles most closely associated with Maria Callas – and it is Medea, rather than Médée, because she only ever sang Cherubini’s Médée (1797) in the Italian translation by Carlo Zangarini. It occupies sixth place in the list of roles she sang most often, with a total of 31 performances, and it was a part to which she brought an especially personal and intensely felt interpretation, informed by both her Greek background and her matchless talent for tragedy. Although she was associated above all with the Romantic bel canto repertoire and with Verdi, she also ventured with great success into the Classical repertoire, appearing on stage in works by composers from Gluck (Alceste, Ifigenia in Tauride) to Haydn (Orfeo ed Euridice – she made her debut as Eurydice on stage in Florence with Erich Kleiber in 1951) and Mozart (Die Entführung aus dem Serail at La Scala in 1952, in Italian). To these one could add Spontini’s La vestale (1807), which lies stylistically somewhere between Médée and Norma (La Scala, 1954), even Beethoven’s Fidelio (1804–14), which she sang in Athens in 1944. Medea, falling between the late Classical and pre-Romantic, was the ideal role for Callas (she starred again as the sorceress of Colchis in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea in 1969, in an altogether different kind of classical reinterpretation, which, although non-musical, had a preview screening at the Paris Opéra). It was at the 1953 Maggio Musicale in Florence that Callas made her debut as Medea, under the baton of Vittorio Gui: the live recording stands as a lasting legacy of her incredible stage presence. So successful was she that La Scala engaged her to repeat the role at the end of the same year, this time with Leonard Bernstein on the podium: another live recording captured another incomparable moment in operatic history. After performances in Venice, Rome, Dallas, London and even the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, it was in this most emblematic of roles that Callas bid her final farewell to La Scala, on 29 May 1962. In between the two, in September 1957 (the same year as Il barbiere di Siviglia, La sonnambula, Turandot and Manon Lescaut!), Callas recorded Medea in Milan, in a version that differed somewhat from her stage performances, if only for the reduced, almost chamber-like orchestral ensemble and the generally incisive nature of its playing, closer to the practice of the late 18th century than to the pre-Romantic feel of her stage incarnation of Medea. –MICHEL ROUBINET

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