Callas, La Divina. - sound recording reviews

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Ralph De Toledano

MARIA CALLAS was a great operatic actress, and a diva in the style of the time when enthusiastic audiences drew the carriages of their favorites through the streets. She had sultry looks, a temperament to go with them, and a flair for publicity. Years ago, she would have forever commanded the adoration of her followers. But in the age of television and hi-fi, she suffered from too much exposure and from the insulting ability of critics to analyze her voice in the absence of her presence. In her prime, that voice was a formidable instrument. But when it came to artistry and to purity of tone, she could never stand comparison with, let us say, Lucrezia Bori, or Renata Tebaldi. Can you imagine Maria Callas singing the Ave Maria or the Salce from Verdi's Otello? She would, as always, have sharped on the high notes.

Now Maria Callas has been immortalized by EMI in a limited-edition 4-CD boxed set, with a glossy-paper accompanying brochure, titled Callas, La Divina. Her fans, and they are still legion, will applaud and weep for the past. But the biographical commentary in the brochure, though it does its best, cannot explain away her fall from musical grace. It depicts her as "an ultimately tragic figure who sacrificed her career and eventually her life for a man who used her and then rejected her" -- Aristotle Onassis, who had turned to the more newsworthy Jacqueline Kennedy. This is the stuff of which operas are made -- but in the case of Callas, it is just not true. Beyond the lure of his billions, Onassis was never an homme fatal, and Callas pressed on to continue her career. What ended that career was not heartbreak but the most mortal of diseases for a singer, the incurable "shake" which destroys the ability to sing, particularly in the upper ranges. But in these recordings she stays fixed, as in the days when she could burst on the stage and draw waves of applause before she had sung a single note.

The "big treatment" can be a dangerous thing -- and EMI is giving it to Sarah Chang, a 14-year-old Philadelphia-born Korean violinist, who has been concertizing since age 5. You can hear her on a disc playing Lalo's Symphonie espagnole (with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) and the Vieuxtemps Concerto No. 5 with the Philharmonic Orchestra -- both conducted by Charles Dutoit. These are virtuoso traps designed to demonstrate technique -- and this, Sarah Chang has in amazing abundance. There is nothing in these finger-busters that she does not take with ease and confidence. The test will come for her, as it does for every Wunderkind, when technique must be combined with musical understanding and emotional depth.

Turn therefore to Isaac Stern in Alban Berg's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which Sony gives us in its A Life in Music series of great Stern reissues. He is the consummate violinist in bowing and fingering, but beyond technique, he is also a musician -- that is, he becomes part of what he is playing, an extension of the composer's emotion and art. Berg's concerto is a difficult and disturbing work, and one in which he made responsive music of Schoenberg's 12-tone rows. Stern gives its anti-lyricism a lyricism of its own, and his tonal beauty brings emotion to what in other hands would be a dry cerebralism. Even the harsh double-stops seem to sing.

Franz Schubert was driven by anti-clericalism and the conflict of his homosexuality to struggle with an anguished faith. In the Masses he wrote, he always struck out from the Credo the affirmation of unam sanctam et apostolicam ecclesiam and tried to make personal what is the Church's affirmation. But it is in Schubert's Mass in E-Flat Major and its tumult and torment that we can understand his thwarted religiosity. This is the greatest of his works, greater than the symphonies that we hear in the concert hall. The musicologists find theological and emotional meaning in its chromaticism, its shifts in tempo, the richness and density of its score. But it is to the Et incarnatus est -- a statement of Christianity's great and central Mystery, which in its simplicity transcends the involuted arguments of the early Fathers -- that we must turn. The Incarnatus is sung movingly and brilliantly in this Sony recording by a boy soprano and two tenors. Bruno Weil, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Chorus Viennensis express and sustain Schubert's terror and solace at being confronted by God and the world's sins.

Haydn's Heiligmesse, among the last of his liturgical works, is coupled in a Sony recording with other religious music, including a stirring Te Deum dedicated to the Empress Marie Thercse. The Heiligmesse -- here beautifully performed by Bruno Weil, the Tolzer Knabenchor, and Tafelmusic -- is an important work. Complex yet direct, it calls on Haydn's greatest skills, drawing on folk sources and on earlier voices, yet dominated by Haydn's tremendous command of musical composition and of the liturgy. Like his other Masses the Heiligmesse speaks searchingly and movingly, with an eloquence at one with his faith. Contrast it with the Rachmaninoff Liturgy of St. John Crysostom, a "concerto for choir" performed for Sony by the chamber choir Lege Artis. This, you might say, is Gregorian chant with a Russian accent -- for the Russian church has never permitted the intrusion of instruments or much deviation from the original accent, and Rachmaninoff does not stray. It is beautiful music, beautifully performed, but it makes you wonder what liturgical music in the land of the Tsars would have been had the church opened the doors to a developing musical sensibility.