Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Victor de Sabata – Puccini: Tosca (1953/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:48:54 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
This Tosca, made in 1953 with the forces of La Scala, is a landmark in recording history. Conducted with searing intensity by Victor de Sabata, it teams Callas with two of her closest colleagues, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano and the baritone Tito Gobbi – a performer who could rival Callas in dramatic finesse and power. Tosca’s aria ‘Vissi d’arte’ (I lived for art) has come to be seen as Callas’ personal manifesto.
Tosca,’ Giacomo Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker,’ had its premiere in 1900. The libretto, by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, was based on the Sardou drama of the same name. The opera has come to be associated with Maria Callas, the most celebrated interpreter of the title role. This recording, which dates from 1953, is THE classic performance, one of two ‘official’ recordings, as it were. It is a must-have for all Callas fans. (There is another official recording, made in 1964, with a different conductor, Georges Prêtre, and a different Cavaradossi, Carlo Bergonzi, but as the years passed, so did the quality of Callas’s voice.) This earlier version is far superior.
Tradition mandates that we hear Callas sing with her fabled partner, the honey-voiced Di Stefano. Here, his sweetness is a wonderful counterpoint to Callas’s dramatic, covered voice. Tito Gobbi provides a crafty Scarpia, and De Sabata’s conducting is considered by many to be the ultimate reading of this work. But Callas is the diva here, and the listener is treated to the full amalgam of her emotional range. This performance is the myth-making one!
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Maria Callas, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Puccini: Manon Lescaut (1957/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:00:44 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
1957, only three days after the company had completed Turandot. On vinyl the sound was not an unqualified success – perhaps one reason, combined with anxiety about some of Callas’s unsteadier top notes, why the original release was delayed for three years. These problems seemed to vanish, however, once the recording was digitally remastered for CD. Manon is one of four roles – the others being Nedda, Mimì and Carmen – that Callas recorded without having sung them on stage. This does not seem from her performance to have been any barrier to her accustomed method of plundering both music and text of a role new to her for psychological insights. Such interpretative understanding led Callas to present Manon throughout as the simple country girl. This holds whether she is precisely observing Puccini’s frequent ‘con semplicità’ instruction in Act I, transparently acting her new social position as Geronte’s kept woman, yielding to flaming passion at the return to her life of Des Grieux (both Act II) or dying in the Louisiana desert (Act IV). In this final scena, ‘Sola, perduta, abbandonata’, Callas finds the same uncanny empty tone in her voice that she used for other characters on the verge of death, in particular Mimì and Violetta.
The score of Manon Lescaut is frequently criticised for the supposed incoherence of its libretto (no fewer than six hands were involved, including Leoncavallo and Puccini himself) and its over-the-top immaturity. But Callas is careful throughout to reserve her emotional outbursts for where they will best tell a story whose almost filmic gaps anticipate later Puccini. Her way of doing this was often to isolate and concentrate on certain phrases within a set-piece. ‘Un freddo che m’agghiaccia’ catches the freezing cold of Manon’s feelings about loveless aristocratic life, ‘tu, tu, amore tu’ her feelings for Des Grieux (both in Act II) and ‘terra di pace mi sembrava questa’ (‘this seemed a peaceful land to me’) her hopes for salvation even in her final exile. –MIKE ASHMAN, 2014
Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Verdi: Rigoletto (1955/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:58:03 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
When she sang the role of Gilda in Rigoletto on stage in Mexico in 1952, Maria Callas was unhappy at her reception, especially as she had been reluctant to undertake the role in the first place, and after just two performances she never returned to it again, until this studio recording in September 1955. For the project, producer Walter Legge brought together what had already become a hugely successful ‘house’ team consisting of the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, the baritone Tito Gobbi, the conductor Tullio Serafin and the forces of La Scala, Milan. Together, or in various combinations, these artists were to record some 17 complete operas, and this Rigoletto is one of the pivotal titles in the series. As in La sonnambula, Callas was able to lighten her voice to suggest the virginal simplicity of Gilda at her first appearance, while still portraying warm-hearted sincerity in her love for her father. And this is the one opera that affords Callas and Gobbi three major duets that are central to the structure of the work. Both artists were consummate actors as well as singers, and nowhere else do they have as much scope for delving so deeply into the characterisation of their roles, which change drastically during the course of the drama. They had first sung together in São Paulo in La traviata in 1951, and Gobbi was with Callas in the final Tosca at Covent Garden in July 1965 that marked the end of her stage career. And that same Traviata in São Paulo in 1951 also marked the first encounter between Callas and Di Stefano. They went on to appear together a number of times on stage as well as on record and it was Di Stefano who partnered Callas on her final international recital tour in 1973/34. This mono recording from 1955 was recently selected by Gramophone magazine as the best of all available versions of Rigoletto. –TONY LOCANTRO, 2014
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Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Verdi: Rigoletto (1955/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:58:03 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
When she sang the role of Gilda in Rigoletto on stage in Mexico in 1952, Maria Callas was unhappy at her reception, especially as she had been reluctant to undertake the role in the first place, and after just two performances she never returned to it again, until this studio recording in September 1955. For the project, producer Walter Legge brought together what had already become a hugely successful ‘house’ team consisting of the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, the baritone Tito Gobbi, the conductor Tullio Serafin and the forces of La Scala, Milan. Together, or in various combinations, these artists were to record some 17 complete operas, and this Rigoletto is one of the pivotal titles in the series. As in La sonnambula, Callas was able to lighten her voice to suggest the virginal simplicity of Gilda at her first appearance, while still portraying warm-hearted sincerity in her love for her father. And this is the one opera that affords Callas and Gobbi three major duets that are central to the structure of the work. Both artists were consummate actors as well as singers, and nowhere else do they have as much scope for delving so deeply into the characterisation of their roles, which change drastically during the course of the drama. They had first sung together in São Paulo in La traviata in 1951, and Gobbi was with Callas in the final Tosca at Covent Garden in July 1965 that marked the end of her stage career. And that same Traviata in São Paulo in 1951 also marked the first encounter between Callas and Di Stefano. They went on to appear together a number of times on stage as well as on record and it was Di Stefano who partnered Callas on her final international recital tour in 1973/34. This mono recording from 1955 was recently selected by Gramophone magazine as the best of all available versions of Rigoletto. –TONY LOCANTRO, 2014
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Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Verdi: La forza del destino (1954/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:45:32 minutes | 1,71 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Relentlessly pursued by Fate, Leonora in La forza del destino is a haunted heroine whose passions and fears are expressed on a grand scale. Callas’s stage experience of Forza was limited to her early career in Italy – in fact, Leonora was her first Verdi role – but, as Lord Harewood, founder of Opera magazine, observed, her recorded assumption exhibited ‘an unparalleled musical sensibility and imagination and a grasp of the musico-dramatic picture which is unique’. She took her place in a powerful cast conducted by her mentor Tullio Serafin.
‘The two essential reasons for owning this performance of La forza del destino – in preference to all rivals, in spite of a few small cuts – are the incomparable artistry of Maria Callas and the incisive, completely authoritative conducting of Tullio Serafin. For one small example of Serafin’s superb direction, listen to the conclusion of the Alvaro/Carlo scene in Act 3 – marked Allegro agitato e presto. Here he achieves an electric intensity where the first violins accompany with piano triplets which really bristle. Serafin is never frenetic, yet he creates maximum drama. A further example encapsulating all his finest qualities would be the very final scene of the opera. It must be emphasised that his near-ideal conducting contributes enormously to the desirability of this set.’ –Philip Borg-Wheeler, MusicWeb International
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Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Herbert von Karajan – Verdi: Il trovatore (1956/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:09:39 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Like Norma, the role of Leonora in Il trovatore demands both bel canto finesse and considerable vocal and dramatic weight, but Callas sang it only some 20 times. This recording – in which she, Fedora Barbieri, Giuseppe di Stefano and Roland Panerai constitute a suitably impressive quartet of principals – marked her farewell to the complete role and also her final collaboration with Herbert von Karajan.
“Callas and Karajan took the world by the ears in the 1950s with this Il trovatore. Leonora was one of Callas’s finest stage roles, and this recording is wonderfully intense, with a dark concentrated loveliness of sound in the principal arias that puts one in mind of Muzio or Ponselle at their best. Walter Legge always managed to team Callas with the right conductor for the work in question. Often it was Serafin, but Karajan in Il trovatore is utterly compelling.
This opera, like Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, is one of music’s great essays in sustained rhythmic intensity; dramatically it deals powerfully in human archetypes. All this is realised by the young Karajan with that almost insolent mastery of score and orchestra which made him such a phenomenon at this period of is career. There are some cuts, but, equally, some welcome inclusions (such as the second verse of ‘Di quella pira’, sung by di Stefano with his own unique kind of slancio). Although the EMI sound is very good, one or two climaxes suggest that in the heat of the moment, the engineer, Robert Beckett, let the needle run into the red and you might care to play the set in mono to restore that peculiar clarity and homogeneity of sound which are the mark of Legge’s finest productions of the mono era. But whatever you do don’t miss this set.” –Gramophone Classical Music Guide
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Maria Callas, Orch del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Verdi: Aida (1955/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:24:41 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
One of the legendary moments in Callas’ career came in 1950 in Mexico City, when she interpolated a stupendous top E flat at the end of the Triumphal Scene in Act II of Aida. In this recording under Serafin she abided by the score, but still prompted Gramophone to speak of her ‘fascinating art and prodigious personality’, observing the way she was ‘rapt in imaginative intensity in the significance of the words’.
Nobody disputes that the voice of Maria Callas is one of the great instruments of our time, and here is the proof. EMI’s remastered recording of this 1955 performance of Verdi’s ‘Aida’ testifies to her genius as a performer and a star.
Callas and ‘Aida’ had enjoyed a five-year relationship leading up to this recording. Callas was praised for her dynamic portrayal of Aida’s rapidly changing emotions, and criticized for the sustained lament required in ‘O patria mia.’ At any rate, Callas captured the imagination of opera-goers across the globe with her powerful voice, and drew them in with the strength of her personality.
Recorded in Milan at Teatro alla Scala with the house orchestra conducted by Tullio Serafin, these CDs recapture the warmth, vibrancy, and clarity of the original performance. Verdi’s masterwork in the hands of a timeless artiste makes for enjoyable listening and fascinating discussion, both today and in future years.
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Maria Callas – Maria Callas: 50 Most Beautiful Opera Arias (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 04:14:05 minutes | 2,61 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BnF Collection
What a fantastic download. Firstly, the voice of Maria Callas, in this sample of her work there are so many contrasting emotions, love, joy, happiness, sadness, anger, regret etc. Secondly the range of operas that this selection opens up, there are 43 operas represented, from the familiar: Carmen, La Traviata, Tosca to the less familiar Medea, Un Ballo Maschero, Ernani to the unknown (to me) Il Pirata, La Vestale, Le Pardon de Peomel. So it alerts your ears to new possibilities. Thirdly the soundscape is good excellent orchestras the Philharmonia and La Scala being the most represented and excellent conductors Serafin and Pretre together with Resigno, Votto, Karajan etc. Lastly the generosity, over 4 hours of good music.
Read more![Maria Callas, Franco Corelli, Christa Ludwig, Nicola Zaccaria, Piero De Palma, Edda Vincenzi, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin - Vincenzo Bellini: Norma (1960/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/29/0825646254040_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Maria Callas, Franco Corelli, Christa Ludwig, Nicola Zaccaria, Piero De Palma, Edda Vincenzi, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Vincenzo Bellini: Norma (1960/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:41:32 minutes | 3,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics
This 1960 Norma represents Maria Callas’s final complete documented version of her signature role. Seven recordings of the opera exist with Callas (1950–60), plus numerous snippets and scenes captured between 1949 and 1965. With 89 performances, Norma is Callas’s most performed part; certainly no other 20th-century diva is more closely associated with the role, and no one since has even remotely eclipsed Callas in the perception of opera lovers. It was Callas’s mentor, Tullio Serafin, who understood the potential of her voice, temperament and musicality in terms of this iconic role, selecting her for performances in Florence in 1948, teaching her the role himself. At this time, Callas was singing Turandot, Aida and Isolde. And while dramatic sopranos who sang that sort of repertoire sometimes took a stab at Norma, it was never with Callas’s bel canto acumen. Her understanding of the drama as expressed through Bellini’s vocal line, her dazzling coloratura – unheard-of at the time in big voices – combined with her unique ability as a physical and vocal actress to set her Norma apart from, quite literally, all others. Eventually, the role served for her operatic debut in Mexico City, London, New York and Paris. The advent of stereo inspired a ‘remake’ of Norma with Callas, whose 1954 recording was already a classic. Urgency came in several forms: the Callas/Onassis affair, which had transferred the soprano’s passion for work to one for living (her performances in 1960, preceding this recording, amounted to a total of two Normas in Greece); statements about imminent retirement; and the toll the diva’s committed singing had taken on a once-indomitable voice. While there is no doubt top notes are steadier on the earlier Norma, coloratura easier, piano singing freer, this Norma offers a deeper, more introspective reading of the role, and more than its share of gorgeous singing – from Callas, and a superior supporting cast. Countless moments, too numerous to catalogue here, raise this Callas Norma to the level of genius. From a haunting ‘Casta Diva’ to a final scene of incomparable grandeur and sweep, in every startlingly brilliant detail, Callas is Norma. –IRA SIFF, 2014
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![Maria Callas, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicola Zaccaria, Nicola Monti, Eugenia Ratti, Giuseppe Morresi, Franco Ricciardi, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Antonino Votto - Vincenzo Bellini: La Sonnambula (1957/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/29/6y0CpGK.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Maria Callas, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicola Zaccaria, Nicola Monti, Eugenia Ratti, Giuseppe Morresi, Franco Ricciardi, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Antonino Votto – Vincenzo Bellini: La Sonnambula (1957/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:00:55 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics
While all of Callas’s bel canto roles were revelatory, her first Amina achieved instant legendary status partly because of the Luchino Visconti production surrounding it. Visconti replicated a bygone era visually by costuming the slimmed-down diva in the manner of a 19th-century ballerina, while Callas replicated that time vocally, combining bel canto style with a full dramatic impersonation not associated with a role owned at the time by bird-like coloraturas. Callas transported Bellini’s lyric masterpiece back to the age of Giuditta Pasta, for whom it was created, offering her share of vocal fireworks – but in the name of expression. Suddenly, the opera itself was understood anew.
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![Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Rolando Panerai, Nicola Rossi-lemeni, Angelo Mercuriali, Carlo Forti, Aurora Cattelani, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin - Vincenzo Bellini: I Puritani (1953/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/29/0825646254347_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Rolando Panerai, Nicola Rossi-lemeni, Angelo Mercuriali, Carlo Forti, Aurora Cattelani, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, Tullio Serafin – Vincenzo Bellini: I Puritani (1953/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:22:04 minutes | 1,36 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics
In August 1947 Maria Callas, newly arrived back in Europe from an abortive search for roles in America, secured the role of Gioconda at the Verona Arena and met the second great musical influence on her life, the opera’s conductor Tullio Serafin. With Serafin, Callas went on at first to sing Turandot, Aida, Brünnhilde and Isolde (the last two in Italian).
Serafin was a passionate Wagnerian but he had other ideas for his protégée. In the 20th century up until then the bel canto roles of Donizetti, Bellini or Rossini had been taken generally by light coloratura voices like that of Elvira de Hidalgo, Callas’s teacher in Athens. Revivals of the operas thus became showcases for vocal agility rather than serious music drama. Callas, thought Serafin, could bring to these works a heavier voice that took all their agilitá in its stride while imbuing them with dramatic credibility.
Callas first studied Norma with Serafin (making her debut in the role at Florence in November 1948). Then, the following January at Venice’s La Fenice, the conductor persuaded her to learn and take over Elvira in I puritani at just three days’ notice after her last Brünnhilde of the season. Callas’s success in two such disparate roles yielded comparisons with legendary singers of an earlier generation like Lilli Lehmann.
It led Callas personally, and the repertoire in general, to a new focus on roles that had been written as vehicles not only for singers with exceptional vocal capabilities but for dedicated and effective actresses. In bel canto roles like Bellini’s Norma, Amina and Elvira or Donizetti’s Lucia and Anna Bolena Callas went on to uncover their sheer drama. This was the very quality (representation of character being at least as important as singing) that, at the expense of more accomplished vocalists, Bellini sought while insisting on Giuditta Pasta as Norma or, for that matter, Puccini when casting Hariclea Darclée as his first Tosca because of her beauty.
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Maria Callas – Remastered The Complete Studio Recordings 1949-1969 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 65:49:52 minutes | 56.8 GB | Genre: Classical , Opera
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Source: Qobuz | Artwork: Digital booklet | © Columbia Records
Featuring 26 complete operas and 13 recitals, this must be the gramophone event of the year. Callas’s voice recorded perfectly well; it was its transfer to and from disc which caused the problems. Thanks to new state-of-the-art software and painstaking editing of the original tapes, we are now as close as we shall ever be to hearing this unique artist as she actually sounded live in the studio. –Gramophone
“The complete recordings of Maria Callas, one of the greatest vocal artists of the 20th century, have been collected and issued once again, this time in impressively remastered versions” –Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 2014
The EMI masters of Maria Callas were re-mastered for the purposes of CD and released as a physical product in 2014. We are happy to offer it now as a full digital product in supreme audio quality. More than 25 years’ worth of music has been collected here, and filter applications have been applied to cover up sound defects (and other distortions). The recordings were passed into the expert hands of sound engineers Allan Ramsey and Simon Gibson, both of Abbey Road, who have made the recordings, under the directions of the Warner Classics label, as close to the sound of the originals as possible. The gain in terms of sound is undeniable, whether by removing harsh noise or treating distorted sounds, and the natural harmonics have not been altered. What’s more, this decision to remaster everything has resulted in the recovering of the entirety of Callas’s oeuvre – meaning that we need no longer fear the disastrous loss of copies… But who said greater definition and cleanliness of sound permitted a better perception of detail! If we discern the disc’s nuances more clearly, the dynamic adjustments, soundscapes, etc., then we discern a greater fidelity in terms of timbre. Certain defects are, importantly, still left in play. Above all, Callas’s voice sounds more dramatic, brighter, more present, and more beautiful in its phrasing; especially pleasing is that it has been revealed for the first time in all of its acidity, in all of its cracks. With the sound completely rejuvenated, recordings such as La Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Il Trovatore, the Barber of Seville, and others, are as irreplaceable as ever.
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Maria Callas – La renaissance d’une voix (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 03:33:26 minutes | 3,16 GB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Source: Q0buz | Digital Booklet | © Warner Classics
Callas romantique, belcantiste, vériste… La Voix du siècle se dévoile dans ce coffret de 3 cd qui est l’aboutissement d’un traitement numérique récent réalisé à partir des archives de Warner classics. En plus d’être une technicienne chevronnée, bel cantiste nuancée et scrupuleuse, Callas est surtout un actrice à tempérament, une tragédienne hors pair qui rétablit la puissance dramatique du verbe, tout en illuminant et avec quelle intelligence la force et les enjeux de chaque situation. Bel cantiste et bellinienne exemplaire par la pureté de sa musicalité et l’intensité de son jeu, Callas chante ici Norma (casta diva), La Sonnambula ; rossinienne facétieuse et piquante, voici La Cenerentola et Rosina (du Barbier de Séville : una voce poco fa…) ; verdienne exaltée, éruptive comme incandescente, elle est La Traviata (Violetta qui s’ouvre à l’amour : E strano), Leonora (Trouvère), Lady Macbeth (pâle, livide, errante comme une mourante insomniaque que rattrapent ses crimes abjects… Luce langue), Elena des Vêpres Siciliennes, Aida (Ritorno vincitor à l’adresse de son amant le général Radamès) ; donizetienne, Callas chante Lucia di Lammermoor, et plus tardivement les héroïnes tragiques de Puccini : Tosca, Cio cio San (Butterfly), Turandot, sans omettre la prière sombre et palpitante de Suor Angelica ou de Ginanni Schichi…
Callas forever :: Vériste, Callas prête sa voix d’argent à Adriana Lecouvreur de Cilea, Madeleine d’Andrea Chénier, sans omettre l’hymne à la nature de la pure Wally (Catalani). En français, Callas qui meurt à Paris et trouve en France une seconde patrie : chante alceste de Gluck, Carmen de Bizet (Séguédille et chanson bohème), Saint-Saëns (chant d’ivresse et d’extase amoureuse : Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix), Juliette de Gounod (Roméo et Juliette), Lakmé de Delibes, Louise de Charpentier (Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée), Marguerite du Faust de Gounod (air des bijoux), Dinorah de Meyerbeer… Compilation anthologique en version remastérisée.