we’ll always have paris
The legendary “Tokyo Traviata,” one of the most often pirated opera videos, has finally been released in an authorized version by VAI. Featuring the golden-age cast of Renata Scotto, Jose Carreras and Sesto Bruscantini, the DVD boasts beautifully restored video and broadcast-quality audio — by far the cleanest version of this telecast La Cieca has ever seen. Here’s a sample from this performance of September 19, 1973:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/hWTfL1HAMOs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
The DVD, which includes subtitles in English, French, Italian, Spanish and (embedded) Japanese, is available through all the usual sources including amazon.com
Oh shucks, La Cieca. I was just about to tell everyone about my complete recording of the first performance of Pelleas in 1902 recorded backstage at the Salle Favart on cylinders made of old pate tins. There’s also an intermission feature of Mary Garden being interviewed by Debussy and some acerbic comments by Stravinsky, who shared Debussy’s box that night.
Amnerees, I am sure that if Mary Garden was present, nobody would attempt to share Debussy’s box.
Since you’re all being so nasty, I’m not going to let any of you hear my recording of the prima of Cosi Fan Tutte. Boy, was Ferrarese del Bene in good voice that night.
Just savoring that someone admitted I was right about something pertaining to British singers!
Ms. Barstow did Shostakovich’s Katerina in San Francisco and was quite effective IF one forgot the sensational Anja Silja performance in the same production 7 years before.
I heard “Viv” Tierney’s over-the-top Overseer ( she cackled as she exited as if she were Klytemnestra, calling attention to being A Major Artist. Of course, no American could have done the role, or Aegusth, for that matter.
Maybe it was Mary Garden’s box that was being shared …
Mary Garden shared her box with entire audiences, did she not?
My very favorite all time tenor, the one with a gorgeous voice that no one could touch, in his prime, and looking like a hundred bucks.
Thanks for this special gift. Made my day.
These posts are so interesting, certainly for an old lady such as myself; Some comments, I still believe there are Callas recordings to surface. I say this in light of when I first started collecting live Callas there was no Cologne Sonnambula or Lisbon Traviata. The Covent Garden Aida was thought to exist, and then it finallly appeared. I don’t know about Fedora, 18 months ago a friend of the late Mr and Mrs Corelli was reputed to be going through their tapes….. Did he find anything? We can only hope. The family of Max Lorenz certainly have a Tristan with Callas as Isolde, but what the sound of it would be like I tremble to think.
In the weighty tome The Unkown Callas -- the Greek years,
there is the possibilty that sound recordings made by the Axis radio exist of Callas as Marta in Tiefland, and as Leonore in Fidelio, and they would be found in the ‘Rundfunkarchiv in Frankfurt.’ The German radio archives were taken to Moscow after the war, but were returned about 10 years ago, and among the recordings was a broadcast of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf from 1938. This information is in the footnote
on page 167. There was a recorrding of Callas in the oratorio “San Giovanni Battista” [by Stradella] 18th September 1949 when Callas heard her own voice for the first time and was horrified. I believe there is a recording of her opening at La Scala as Elena in Vespri 7th Dec 1951, and also a Don Carlo performance exists. There is reputed to be a Sonnambula from March 2nd 1957 also. The State Opera in Vienna broadcast her Lucia there, she sang three Lucias with Karajan, June 12th, 14th and 16th, right after the Scala Fedora performances. As with any archive, it’s very much up to the archivist in charge to actually know what they have, and often, it’s the archivists own sphere of interest that gets
the attention.
Turandot from La Venice, January/February 1948, possibly, it was ceratinly broadcast. In post war Italy very few could afford tape recorders, large cumbersome things in those days, and recordings survive if the radio station made acetate discs for a repeat broadcast. Likewise Turco in Italia
from October 19th 1950, of which a snippet turned up recently, but this was known to exist for a long time. There might be a couple of RAI broadcasts from Turin, March 7th 1949, and March 13th 1950 that exist in an archive or at the botttom of a trunk in someone’s attic.
I suspect that someone at the Royal Opera House recorded her Puritani mad scene at the Royal Gala on June 10th 1958. In the last few years better recordings have surfaced of the Lisbon Traviata and the Vespri from Florence, the latter from the late Walter Legge archive via Lord Harewood. If Legge recorded Vespri, maybe he recorded one of the two Haydn Orfeos that she sang on 9th and 10th of June 1951. It was broadcast and Legge with infinite means as his disposal could have recorded the broadast from the radio in his hotel suite.
I’m sure I am not alone when I say I live in hope of hearing
re-discovered Callas recordings in my lifetime.
“The German radio archives were taken to Moscow after the war, but were returned about 10 years ago, and among the recordings was a broadcast of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf from 1938.”
Some acetates of her wartime tour of the Eastern Front recently surfaced in Slocvakia. She inserts a cadenza into the Horst Wessel Song that must have made the S.S. men thrill.
Oy veh!