Mrz 1995 Hamburg

Maria Callas in Concert: Hamburg 1959 & 1962
Italian | Subtitle: It/Fr/En/De | 1:58:42 | 720 x 576 | PAL | 4:3 | 25fps | MPEG-2 | LPCM | 48kHz | 4.3GB
Genre : Classical/Concert
Publisher: EMI

It is a pity that so few recordings of Maria Callas in concert exist to leave the testimony of this genius of the singing and actor's play that she was. Only 5 recitals have been filmed (Paris 1958, Hamburg 1959 and 1962, Covent Garden 1962 and 1964), recorded on 3 DVD.
2nd of the 3 posts.

The 1958 Hamburg concert finds Callas just one year before the loss of her voice and although her voice is not what it was in 1952 you can still hear the Vocal Miracle. The 1962 Hamburg concert finds Callas in a very tired voice but nevertheless exciting. Overall this one of the very few operatic visual documents of the Greatest Operatic Singer who ever lived!

Gustav Mahler was not yet thirty years old when he mounted the podium to conduct his ‘Symphonic Poem’ (Sinfonische Dichtung) in the Large Hall of the Redoute (Vigadó) in Budapest on 20 November 1889. The young man, who had recently been appointed director of the Hungarian capital’s opera house, was presenting an orchestral composition for the first time that evening. This work, which Mahler thought would be ‘child’s play’, was in fact - as he was to admit years later - “one of [his] boldest.” It is the crystallisation of his childhood, marked by the successive deaths of his brothers and sisters but also by the brutality of his father. The work also embodies the dreams that this rebellious young student at the Vienna Conservatory had already forged some ten years earlier, with the new generation of artists and thinkers of which he was a member.