Un Ballo in Maschera [The Masked Ball] (complete opera recorded in 1956)

"Callas on top form never misses an opportunity to wring the last drop of intensity out of her two arias and the act 2 scene by the gallows is a masterpiece of visual singing. Her colouring of the phrases is so expressive that we instinctively know what she looks like. As a contrast the resigned Morrò, ma prima in grazia in act 3 is eternally moving."
(MusicWeb March 2008)

This 1956 recording of Un ballo in maschera was made before Maria Callas undertook it on stage. Of her performances of Un ballo at the beginning of the 1957/8 season at La Scala, Milan, the conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni remembers '[how] she had this strange, burning, singular talent; she was always herself and yet always different in every rôle. A voice of more even quality could not have imparted the tension, or Amelia's desperation so effectively. Had she sought less wide a range, fewer colours then perhaps she might have achieved a more homogeneous sound, but she preferred richness of colour and play of lightness and shade in recreating the character.' Throughout the rôle Callas chooses an appropriate plangent vocal colour to characterize Amelia. In, for example, the Act II aria Ecco l'orrido campo, her singing shows the kind of detail redolent of her best work: the perfection of the repeated triplets, her shaping and control, and her inimitable way with the cadenza.