Great Opera Recordings
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901): Il Trovatore
Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano after a play by Antonio Garcia Gutiérrez.
Manrico - Giuseppe Di Stefano (tenor)
Leonora - Maria Callas (soprano)
Count di Luna - Rolando Panerai (baritone)
Azucena - Fedora Barbieri (mezzo-soprano)
Ferrando - Nicola Zaccaria (bass)
Inez - Luisa Villa (mezzo-soprano)
Ruiz - Renato Ercolani (tenor)< br> An Old Gypsy - Giulio Mauri (bass)
A Messenger - Renato Ercolani (tenor)
Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala, Milan
(Norberto Mola, chorus master)
Herbert von Karajan, conductor

Before Maria Callas made this August 1956 recording of Il Trovatore, at La Scala, Milan, she had been singing it often since 1950 and with notable success. Her 1953 Covent Garden performances earned golden opinions. The Times critic considered the opera should have been styled Leonora:‘[she] sang and acted everyone off the stage’… The beauty of her line, its plasticity, and its strength, and the easy richness with which she unfolds long phrases, was memorably shown in Tacea la notte’.Throughout this recording Callas’s singing of Leonora’s music is superlative. In, for example, D’amor sull’ali rosee her delivery is so musically authoritative she shapes the long phrases with subtle use of rubato and perfectly drawn portamenti, each differently weighted according to the dynamics, the interval accomplished, and the speed of the music.
Released 2007.