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Bellini - La sonnambula | Warner 9029584465

Bellini - La sonnambula

Label: Warner

Cat No: 9029584465

Barcode: 0190295844653

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Opera

Release Date: 15th September 2017

This product has now been deleted. Information is for reference only.

Contents

Artists

Maria Callas (soprano)
Cesare Valletti
Giuseppe Modesti
Gabriella Carturan

Conductor

Leonard Bernstein

Works

Bellini, Vincenzo

La Sonnambula

Artists

Maria Callas (soprano)
Cesare Valletti
Giuseppe Modesti
Gabriella Carturan

Conductor

Leonard Bernstein

About

Maria Callas Live captures the legendary soprano in action on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. Newly remastered recordings from 1949–1964.

The La Scala production of La sonnambula in 1955 united three towering artistic personalities: Maria Callas, Leonard Bernstein and Luchino Visconti. The excitement is palpable in this recording of its first night. Visually, it was of a stylised, Romantic beauty, with Callas presented like a classical ballerina. Aurally, Callas, supported at every turn by Bernstein’s alert and flexible conducting, portrays Bellini’s gentle heroine with exquisite empathy, creating a hushed, other-worldly atmosphere when Amina sings as she sleep-walks, and bursting with joy and relief in a blaze of coloratura in the opera’s final moments.

Recorded 5 March 1955, Teatro alla Scala, Milano

Maria Callas was born to a Greek family in New York in 1923. Her vocal training took place in Athens, where her teacher was the coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo, who had sung with Enrico Caruso and Feodor Chaliapin. After early performances in Greece, Callas’ international career was launched in 1947 when she performed the title role in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at the Arena di Verona in Italy.

Her voice defied simple classification and her artistic range was extraordinary. In her early twenties she sang such heavy dramatic roles as Gioconda, Turandot, Brünnhilde and Isolde, but over the course of her career her most famous roles came to be: Bellini’s Norma and Amina (La sonnambula); Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata); Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Anna Bolena, Cherubini’s Medea and Puccini’s Tosca. Though her timbre was not always conventionally beautiful, Callas’s musicianship and phrasing were in a class of their own. She brought characters to vivid life with her skill in colouring her tone and making insightful use of the text. She is credited with changing the history of opera: by placing a perhaps unprecedented emphasis on musical integrity and dramatic truth, and by transforming perceptions – and reviving the fortunes – of the bel canto repertoire, particularly Bellini and Donizetti.

The 1950s marked the height of Callas’s career. Its base lay in the opera houses of Italy, and she became the prima donna assoluta of Milan’s legendary La Scala – notably in the productions of Luchino Visconti – but her operatic appearances also encompassed London’s Royal Opera House, the New York Metropolitan Opera, Paris Opéra, the Vienna State Opera, and the opera houses of Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Lisbon, and, in the early 1950s, Mexico City, São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro.       

From 1959, when she started a life-changing love affair with the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, her performing career slowed down and her voice became more fragile. Her final stage performances came in 1965, when she was only 42. There were many plans for a return to the stage – and for further complete recordings – but they never reached fruition, though in 1974 she gave a series of concerts in Europe, North America and Japan with the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano; he had partnered her frequently in the opera house and in the studio, not least in the 1953 La Scala Tosca under Victor de Sabata, considered a landmark in recording history. Callas died alone in her Paris apartment in September 1977.

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