Warner Classics Announces Maria Callas Live: Remastered Live Recordings 1949 - 1964

Although Maria Callas was just 53 when she died - 40 years ago on September 16, 1977 - she changed the face of opera for generations to come. Her legend has never faded: she remains the supreme singing-actress, the unsurpassed diva, and the glamorous style icon whose private life was often as dramatic as one of the tragic heroines she portrayed on stage.

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of her death in Paris, Warner Classics presents the Maria Callas Live Remastered Edition: a deluxe 42-CD box set (also available as a digital download and on streaming platforms) drawing together the great soprano's live opera and recital recordings, with the invaluable inclusion of 12 roles she never recorded in the studio. These 20 complete operas and five filmed recitals on Blu-ray have been newly remastered from the highest quality source material, with the cutting-edge technology of Studio Art et Son in Paris.

Maria Callas Live captures in sumptuous sound the very heart of Callas' artistry: it is on the stages of the world's great opera houses and concert halls that the Maria Callas legend came to life. Thanks to faithful remastering, listeners can hear these performances in greater clarity than ever before, with many of the recordings restored to achieve unprecedented immediacy and authenticity. In the best preserved cases, the voice is heard in all its splendor and dramatic potency as if truly seeing La Divina perform live.
The landmark box set contains a richly-illustrated 200-page book with a chapter dedicated to each role sung by Callas in these recordings.

The cover art of each opera album in the collection presents an iconic photo of the soprano in the corresponding performance. The edition has been developed in collaboration with the Callas estate.
Following the Success of CALLAS REMASTERED: The Complete Studio Recordings
In 2014 Warner Classics, the guardian of Maria Callas' official recorded catalogue, undertook a monumental remastering at London's Abbey Road Studios of Callas' Complete Studio Recordings, released as a 69-CD collectors' set that met with resounding critical acclaim.

Maria Callas Live is the highly-anticipated follow-up to that groundbreaking studio collection, hailed by The New York Observer "a beacon illuminating the mysterious but indispensable art of Maria Callas...You couldn't ask for better than what Warner Classics has done with Maria Callas - The Studio Recordings Remastered."

"The recording now sounds like a million dollars...Restoring to us the sound of the voice as it would have been heard in the studio," declared Gramophone magazine.
The Maria Callas Live Remastered Edition, to be released on September 15, 2017, lives up to the proven quality and inspired curation established by Warner Classics with the 2014 Studio Recordings collection.

CONTENTS
This lavishly-presented boxset comprises 42 CDs (20 complete operas) and 3 Blu-ray (5 recitals).

12 of the operas were never recorded by Callas in the studio:

• Verdi: Nabucco
• Verdi: I vespri siciliani
• Verdi: Macbeth
• Wagner: Parsifal
• Donizetti: Anna Bolena
• Donizetti: Poliuto
• Rossini: Armida
• Bellini: Il pirata
• Gluck: Alceste
• Gluck: Ifigenia in Tauride
• Spontini: La vestale
• Giordano: Andrea Chénier

The 8 other operas in the box capture performances which have made the legend of Callas on stage:

The historic 1951 performance of Verdi's Aida (when she sang an interpolated high E flat at the end of the Triumphal Scene to ecstatic applause); her signature role La traviata (Lisbon 1958, conducted by Franco Ghione with Alfredo Kraus); her only stage incarnation of Rigoletto (1952); Bellini's Norma in London 1952 with Callas "in her vocal prime" for a performance that "electrifies the senses," (Gramophone); Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor with Karajan in 1955 in Berlin - "by common consent, this is about the best performance of Callas's Lucia recorded live or in the studio," (Gramophone); Cherubini's Medea in 1953 ("elemental Callas, fiery and intense" - Gramophone); Bellini's La Sonnambula under Leonard Bernstein at La Scala, and the heartbreaking Puccini Tosca from Covent Garden, 1964.

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