Callas and DiStefano at the Summit
L. Lubin | NY, NY | 05/28/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"There are more than fifty reviews of this performance listed for the EMI issue, so you can read as many of those as you care to: pretty much everyone agrees that this is the best of Maria Callas's many recorded Lucias. I agree whole-heartedly, but we should not ignore the contributions of the other members of the cast, and not least buy any means, the conductor, Herbert von Karajan.
Karajan's recordings of Verdi and Puccini are well known and many well honored, but his ventures into Italian opera of earlier periods were rare indeed. In fact, this 1955 Berlin performance of La Scala on tour is his ONLY Donizetti work recorded, and was unusual for German audiences. Verdi had only been introduced into Germany about 25 years before by Fritz Busch, and Italian opera was sung in German, even in the biggest houses. HvK gives the score everything he's got. In fact, He acquiesces to the audience's demand for an encore of the sextet, something he was known to be opposed to for the msot part. But this performance of that great ensemble is perfectly phrased, balanced, and structured, that he must have wondered if it could be repeated. It could, and was.
As already stated, this is Maria Callas at her peak (1955 may well have been her best year, vide the Norma and Sonnambula recordings from this time). Her voice is leaner than we are accustomed to in bigger roles like Norma and Tosca, but not as light as as her Amina. Callas had an incredible talent for choosing a vocal palette for each role; she is always recognizable as Callas, but the size and shape of her sound varies from role to role. Here she chooses a sound-world for Lucia that conveys a nervous tension from the start.
She is partnered by Giuseppe di Stefano, at every turn her equal in bel canto grace and dramatic involvement. In fact, the audience's frenzy is as great, if not greater, for his "Fra poco a me ricovero" than it was for the mad scene. Rolando Panerai was a favorite baritone of Karajan's and Nicola Zaccaria one of the great basso cantantes of his time. Both give powerful, deeply committed performances. Giuseppe Zampieri and Mario Carlin sing Arturo and Mormanno, respectively. Both would become well known in the near future, and Zampieri is well recorded in leading roles.
I first owned this performance on pre-digital era cassettes, and the sound was excrutiating. The sound here has been cleaned up admirably, with just enough stage noise to remind us that this is indeed a live event. Audience noise during the performance is minimal, but their frenzied appreciation, even adulation, is well preserved. Unfortunately, the microphones so favor the voices that it is almost impossible to hear the instrumental counterpoints throughout the score. This may be peculiar to this particular issue, as sources on these so-called pirated recordings can vary; EMI's issue may have solved the problem.
This performance observes all of the standard cuts of the time. (Lucia performances without cuts are a pretty recent phenomenon.) You won't hear the aria/duet for Raimondo & Lucia in the second act, nor the Wolf's Crag scene or Storm music that originally started Act Three, nor a few dozen pages of less interesting music here and there. but you will hear the kind of performance that makes you forget every other you've ever heard, at least for a while. And when do we get that these days?
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Track Listings (14) - Disc #1