MARIA CALLAS The Puccini Opera Collection (studio recordings, 1953-1957) - PABX047

The legendary 1953 Maria Callas recording of Puccini's Tosca

Tremendous improvements in sound quality lift this landmark recording into a new realm

This recording has been issued and reissued so many times and on so many labels that it seemed futile to begin another transfer unless something really special and new could be brought to it, something to distinguish it clearly and dramatically from all that have gone before. I believe that has been accomplished. Working from mint French LP pressings, Pristine's 32-bit XR remastering process has lifted the veil of nearly 60 years to bring a dramatic new life and clarity to the sound quality familiar to so many for so long.

The result of this process is truly astonishing to hear, and the sound quality revealed is ravishing. In its recommended Ambient Stereo incarnation there's a real sense of space around the performers as well. Finally, analysis of electrical hum buried in the original recording indicates an original performance pitch of A=444.78Hz, which has been preserved for this release.

Andrew Rose

Bringing fabulous new life to La Bohème - one of Maria Callas's finest recordings

"I found Callas’s Mimì one of the most moving I have ever heard" - The Gramophone, 1958

This classic recording of one of the most popular and oft-performed operas ever written was very well recorded for its day (though one can only wish somewhat at headquarters in 1956 had pushed for stereo at this point). Alas the current EMI issue, although generally clean and clear, is a rather dull, lifeless affair to listen to. This new transfer with XR remastering brings real life and sparkle to the production, with a sense of real space on the stage especially present in our Ambient Stereo version.

On the basis of painstaking investigations of residual electrical hums found on the original recordings I've concluded that the orchestral tuning used here was around 445.5Hz, and this remaster has been tuned accordingly - taking into account, for the first time, tape speed drift and minor speed variations between tape machines over the course of the recording. The result is, I hope, definitive.

Andrew Rose

The classic Callas - Karajan Butterfly: now sounds even better!

"Callas and Karajan raise what is so often a mere tear-jerker into the deep tragedy Puccini surely intended ... the performance is quite tremendous" - The Gramophone

The 1955 Callas/Karajan EMI recording of Madama Butterfly is rightly regarded as one of the all-time classics. As the legendary Alan Blyth pointed out in his 1976 review of an LP reissue, it finds Callas at their "absolute peak of her vocal form" with taut, through-conceived support from Karajan "at every turn of the drama". However, Blyth also noted a number of technical short-comings: "recorded sound that is less than lustrous", a "confined" acoustic, "the occasional sound of studio movement" and "some momentary signs of overloading".To these I would add inconsistent tape speeds leading to drifting pitch, background rumble interspersed with accelerating traffic, and a general sense of a thin veil hanging over the sound.

All of these are as present in the most recent 24-bit Callas box set transfers as they were in 1976, or in 1955 - and each has been addressed for this new Pristine XR release. The enclosed acoustic has opened out beautifully here, with a clarity and openness that brings new life to the recording. Ambient Stereo, coupled with the lightest touch of convolution reverberation, which models the real acoustic of one of the world's foremost opera houses, adds a final sprinkle of magic to a sound that might now indeed be called "lustrous". Never has this classic Butterfly ever sounded as good! 

Andrew Rose

It is fascinating to look back at the earliest reviews of what is generally acknowledged today as one of the great Turandot recordings. In writing these notes I had expected to bring you extensive quotes from The Gramophone’s ecstatic review of September 1958. But instead what do I find? Something of an evisceration:

“The timbre [of Callas] is sometimes hollow and plummy in the easier positions; the emission is wavering and sounds both strained and ill supported in the upper reaches; and her Turandot is here, to my ear, totally unsatisfying – no matter how often elsewhere I may applaud this and that stroke of dramatic truth and imagination.

“Next, what about Mme Schwarzkopf? I hear this German Liu with gratitude – and I find her final song before her suicide, “Thou who art girt in ice”, most moving and beautiful, with a true legato and some lovely floated tone, perfectly supported. Sad therefore to report that she throws away her chance in the first song – the lovely morendo ending could so easily have been sostenuto, but goes wisping away in a ladylike gasp. This Liu sounds a bit out of it in an otherwise all Italianate cast…”

But this opinion seems to have been quickly side-lined and forgotten by other critics, as opinions shifted to regard the recording as a classic. By 1979 the same magazine (albeit the pen of a different reviewer) writes, of an LP reissue:

“One thinks of this as Callas’s Turandot, and so it is, with the start of “In questa reggia” bringing a sudden generation of electricity that has one gasping, but hearing this riveting performance afresh has brought it home too how much it is Serafin’s Turandot as well. One might in principle feel that a more reticent manner was more faithful to the score, but Serafin has one on the edge of one’s seat.

“I remember originally finding the obvious stylistic contrast between Schwarzkopf and the other singers rather obtrusive, and some may still find it so, but what I note now are such heavenly moments as the end of “Signore ascolta” when the control of tone and legato in the rising octaves in the codetta is ravishing, ending with an immaculate mesa di voce. This too is a classic performance, finely contrasted with that of the princess.”

And the revisions get better – more recently, again from Gramophone:

“To have Callas, the most flashing-eyed of all sopranos as Turandot, is—on record at least—the most natural piece of casting. Other sopranos may be comparably icy in their command, but Callas with her totally distinctive tonal range was able to give the fullest possible characterization. With her Turandot was not just an implacable man-hater but a highly provocative female. One quickly reads something of Callas's own underlying vulnerability into such a portrait, its tensions, the element of brittleness. Equally in the final arioso of Alfano's completion, ''Del primo pianto'', the chesty way she sings ''Straniero'' in the opening phrase, addressing Calaf, is unforgettable in its continuing threat. With her the character seems so much more believably complex than with others.

It was sad that, except at the very beginning of her career, she felt unable to sing the role in the opera house, but this 1957 recording is far more valuable than any memory of the past, for me one of the most thrillingly magnetic of all her recorded performances, the more so when Schwarzkopf as Liu provides a comparably characterful and distinctive portrait, far more than a Puccinian 'little woman', sweet and wilting. Even more than usual one regrets that the confrontation between princess and slave is so brief. Though for some Schwarzkopf's observance of markings in Liu's two arias may seem to meticulous, the extra detail reinforces the fine-spun Straussian quality, notably in the rising and falling octaves of ''Signore ascolta''."

This XR remastering of what is today acknowledged as one of the great recordings of Turandot helps lift a sonic veil from the original recording – in all of its subsequent reissues – as well as providing a sense of space and dimension to the staging that is particularly welcome in the ensemble and chorus sections. It is tragic that still Walter Legge was resisting stereo recording at La Scala in 1957 – Ambient Stereo processing can only go so far in this respect – but nevertheless I hope you’ll find a considerable improvement here over previous issues.

Andrew Rose

REVIEW (1959)

Manon Lescaut is something more than a historical curiosity framing a few famous solos. It was written con amore and also con slancio. The very beginning of the first act catches you up in its hand and sweeps you forward to the arrival of the coach and poor Manon sitting all by herself in a corner of the hotel yard waiting to be taken off to a convent, where she would have made Sister Angelica and even Casanova's nuns look like paragons of virtue. Once Manon arrives, amore, not to say passione disperata, takes over; and, given a Manon who can present the gay, fatal ingénue, you can be kept on tenterhooks for the rest of the evening. The difference between this and La Bohème is that three years later [Puccini] was able to convey the slancio in more memorable, flexible themes, and observe the amore with amusement as well as passion.

Serafin, in the new recording, manages the slancio all right, the impetus, the bright lights, the charm, the gathering of students whose name is youth and whose god is hope. The opening scene is more neatly, but much less irresistibly, handled in the Decca set. Di Stefano does not make a strong impression at his entrance; too close to the mike to give a suggestion of stage effect, he is vocally awkward too, with his shifts of vocal placing in mid-phrase. He leaves the impress of “Tra voi, belle” to Serafin whose accompaniment is rhythmically superb. In the Decca set Del Monaco sings the piece more engagingly (once you can persuade your gramophone to get over the raw, wiry noise that his microphone placing emphasizes — when will tenors understand that their voices sound less faulty when slightly removed from the mike?) but is poorly supported by the orchestra. There is time to observe that the Lescaut and Geronte are vocally well differentiated and characterized in the new set (and here, by the way, may I correct a misapprehension recently committed to print? Geronte is, as his name implies, an old man, not a coeval rival for Des Grieux); and then Manon is upon us, and a promising set becomes a really stimulating one.

It is the old story again. Maria Callas’s high notes, not so much in the first act as later, are acid in quality and develop what is a beat if not a wobble. But her singing of Manon’s more vivacious passages (I am chiefly thinking of “L’ora, o Tirsi”) is beautifully poised and dazzling; she characterizes Manon in every mood—the gentle, rather preoccupied girl in her first meeting with Des Grieux (“Manon Lescaut mi chiamol”, and a caressing portamento on that last word so as to bring home the thematic importance of the phrase), the spoiled darling at the beginning of the second act, the woman knowing herself in the wrong but still promising to do better next time though everybody else knows she won’t, the kept woman throwing scorn at her protector (“this is the love you offer me”, as she plants a looking glass in front of his face, and Callas’s inflexions make both it and him as visible as the ring and fine clothes with which the old Croesus has adorned her). And so her performance continues, through the slightly comic quick trio in which she tries to collect all her treasures before decamping, through the forlorn degraded convict of the third act, to the death in the American desert which Puccini had the creative audacity to make an act for two characters alone, a symbol of solitude which makes its point on the gramophone more impressively than any proscenium-bounded stage can ever do. Comparison with Tebaldi is here unkind, because Tebaldi is always herself, warm and opulent and slightly fuller toned (if only because “L’ora, o Tirsi” is beyond her reach, Manon is not her part). She makes a really lovely noise in all Manon’s expansive cantabile music, and that in turn is beyond Callas’s reach; but opera is more than vocal euphony, and the much more is where Callas displays herself at every moment of this opera a great artist of the gramophone, an interpreter who removes veils from our eyes, and a singing actress who, like all great singers of this century, transforms a gramophone from a wooden box into an experience.

I must mention that Di Stefano makes a most enjoyable impression in the second and third acts, singing his A minor solo “Ah, Manon, mi tradisce il tuo folle pensier” with genuine ardour, and sustaining with the tension of the third act which explodes in “Guardate, pazzo son”. Fiorenza Cossotto, at present the young singer for whom I can envisage the brightest future among her contemporaries, makes a show-stopping moment of the Madrigal in act two. Serafin gives a disappointing account of the third act intermezzo, strangely exaggerated and heavy. There is a short cut in the last act, from figures 20 to 21. The recorded atmosphere is dull, much less vivid and theatrical than that of the Decca set. I am in no doubt that the new records (which will not appear in stereo form) are musically and dramatically more desirable, though; and for that we have to thank Callas and the conductor who has done so much to make her the artist she is. I am fairly sure that Puccini would thank them too.

W.S.M., The Gramophone, December 1959