Medea Cherubini

Luigi Cherubini has earned a little place in posterity thanks to his Requiem Mass in D minor, written for his own funeral, and above all to his opera Medea, whose revival was one of the highlights of Maria Callas’ career. This strange, unclassifiable composer, not completely classical and only reluctantly romantic, late in life wrote six string quartets, of which Hausmusik London performs the first and last, on period instruments. The former (1814) pays an expected tribute to opera, the first violin frequently showing off in the foreground as a kind of instrumental prima donna.

Cherubini’s major sacred works are generally quite marvelous. The two Requiems have a distinguished history on disc. Toscanini recorded the C minor, Markevitch the D minor, and my colleague David Vernier praised the recent release of the C minor piece on Carus. They are both truly excellent: grave and austere, but also dynamic, moving, and well worth hearing. The same is certainly true of the large-scale Masses: the Missa solemnis in D minor and E major and the Mass in F are especially memorable. Their grandeur never strains for effect and is always leavened with the composer’s Italian lyricism. Cherubini may not have been well-treated by history, but he knew what he was doing.

Giovanni Mayr is known today primarily as the teacher of Donizetti, but in the very late 1700s and first two decades of the 1800s, this German-born, Italian-by-adoption composer was all the operatic rage, combining the fiorature and niceties of Italian vocal writing with a German penchant for orchestration (Medea’s opening aria has a violin obbligato of the type that you simply do not find with the Italians, for instance). Medea in Corinto is considered Mayr’s masterpiece; in fact, it’s a long score, not quite as poweful as Cherubini’s, but with plenty of flavor of its own.

This is a deluxe box set including: Each individual item (complete opera or recital CD) presented in its original artwork, 136 pages hard-back book containing essays, a biography and chronology, rarely-seen photos and also reproductions of revealing correspondence between Maria Callas, Walter Legge and other EMI executives.

Marking the 40th anniversary of Maria Callas’ death (16th September 1977), Maria Callas Live captures the legendary soprano in action on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. Thanks to new audio remastering from the best available sources, this set reveals Callas’ compelling genius as a singing actress with a new truthfulness and immediacy. Containing 20 complete operas – including 12 works she never recorded in the studio – and five complete filmed recitals (with two different stagings of Act 2 of Tosca) on Blu-ray, Maria Callas Live is the indispensable complement to Callas Remastered, Warner Classics’ landmark collection of her studio recordings.