Description:
The story of Maria Callas' live recordings is nearly as dramatic as that of her own woeful life. At one time, they represented a cottage industry of sorts for opera privateers, and one could hardly swing a dead cat in a classical music store without hitting one of Callas' "bootleg" operas and recital recordings. In the 1990s, EMI and the heirs to Callas' business interests invested a lot of time and expense to reclaiming every inch of tape of her legacy and to evicting the residents of the cottage, with the promise to her legions of rabid fans that they would be making all of the booty so reclaimed available in legitimate, high-quality packages. This did tend to level things off a bit, but after the turn of the century in 2000, the privateers picked up right where they left off, and some EMI issues began to drop from sight. The difference was that the Callas craze was finally showing some signs of diminishing, as was inevitable -- by the time EMI's 10-disc set Maria Callas: The Live Recitals appeared in 2006, 30 years had passed since she last sang in public, time enough for the enthusiasm of even second-generation fans who missed her in person to wane. Nonetheless, Callas isn't quite ready to join the ranks of ancient historical singers such as Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini and there is still a strong commercial incentive for EMI to keep its hat in the Callas ring. Maria Callas: The Live Recitals appears to be a case of EMI circling its wagons around her best-sounding live concert material, and in certain cases, the term "best sounding" is meant to be taken in a relative sense; the sound on the London 1958-1959 disc is genuinely terrible despite all of EMI's attempts to rescue it. All of this material has appeared on EMI before, with Callas' Amsterdam Holland Festival performance coming out in 2005, but it's simply not cost effective to keep these nine releases all out as single discs; the 10th is a 1967 radio interview with Edward Downes that EMI has issued twice before. The liner notes are limited to two paragraphs only, but essential details of recording and provenance are included, although the 1952 radio concert identified as originating from "Rome" is shown in many places as having actually been held in Turin. Maria Callas: The Live Recitals is certainly a bargain compared to picking up these performances separately. One would like to say that this is the Callas package for the fan who "has everything," but chances are he/she would have all of this, too. For the Callas curious, this is not the right place to be experimenting owing to the variability of sound and the high amount of repetition among the various selections. One is better to try Callas on video, or in the EMI collection La Divina, which captures her smoldering, exotic essence in a format akin to a recital but in a program made up of studio recordings. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, AMG

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