Maria Callas channels Lady Macbeth in Armida (Scandalous Heroic Coloratura / Sfogato Assoluta) скачать в хорошем качестве

Maria Callas channels Lady Macbeth in Armida (Scandalous Heroic Coloratura / Sfogato Assoluta)

Fred Cohn's review on Callas' complete Armida (kindly provided by Shahrdad): "This Armida, part of Warner Classics’ new, bountiful, forty-two-disc compendium, Maria Callas Live, makes it amply clear what the fuss was about. She’s astonishing throughout, but especially in the opening salvo of the work’s finale. The sorceress Armida has just learned that her lover Rinaldo is abandoning her, and she responds with a series of runs, turns and octave leaps that would defeat all but the most technically accomplished singers. Callas’s singing here doesn’t register just as a technical tour-de-force but also as a searing portrait of rage. Her voice remains at full, torrential strength through even the most intricate passagework. Each note is sounded as cleanly as if on a piano, her attack giving the passagework, for all of its rapidity, a sculptural quality. Other singers have been as fleet, but none has been able to articulate coloratura with the same astounding force or ferocity. The passage is as phenomenal a two minutes of operatic performance as exists on disc. In a role that consists mostly of coloratura, Callas offers an encyclopedic display of the expressive variety that florid singing can achieve. In her Act II duet with Rinaldo, it serves as a means of seduction. The sounds she makes aren’t exactly dulcet: the voice’s resin was a defining quality throughout her all-too-short career. But the way she binds those sounds into shapely, alluring phrases makes mere mellifluousness seem beside the point. “D’amore al dolce impero,” Armida’s showpiece rondo, not only dazzles the ear but demonstrates the sorceress’s supernatural capability for erotic enchantment. Still, Callas makes every bit as overwhelming an effect in the andante central section of the finale, when the writing forsakes coloratura in favor of simple declamation: Armida here has the nobility of a Gluck heroine." Disclaimer - I own nothing