Catalogue # 3959182

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This set begins with the items Callas made for the Italian\ncompany Fonit-Cetra before she signed exclusively to EMI, starting\nwith arias from I puritani, Norma and Tristan & Isolde recorded\nin Turin in November 1949 and followed by Ponchielli’s La Gioconda\n(1952) and Verdi’s La traviata (1953). The rest of the material\ncovers all the complete operas and recitals Callas made in the\nstudio for EMI from 1953 until her last recording sessions in 1969\nas listed below. It also includes Cherubini’s Medea, which she\nrecorded at La Scala in 1957 for Ricordi under a let-out from her\nEMI contract. These recordings are now acknowledged as definitive\nand set a standard against which subsequent recordings of the same\nworks are judged. Many of the operas feature Callas’s regular\nsinging partners - the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano and the baritone\nTito Gobbi - and the conductor who appears most frequently is\nCallas’s mentor, Tullio Serafin. Among the other conductors are\nHerbert von Karajan, Antonino Votto, Georges Prêtre and Victor de\nSabata. Included in the 70 CDs is a CD-ROM containing synopses in\nthree languages covering all the operas and recital albums in the\npackage. There will also be an illustrated booklet containing a\ngeneral note about Callas in three languages and all the track\nlistings

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