Maria Callas' Hamburg recital of May 15, 1959, is already well known as one of her few filmed performances, having been telecast on German television and recorded on a kinescope. This has been released several times legitimately (or not) on video, and the audio portion of the telecast has been pulled off onto a number of bootleg discs. Maria Callas: Live in Hamburg 1959 is EMI's attempt to bring listeners a compact disc of this concert under a legitimate license, with hopefully the best sound possible from the best-known sources. Speaking of sources, the deluxe booklet for this disc, running to 32 pages, is surprisingly mum about where the audio comes from. This is probably because the recording is likely taken from the kinescope itself -- apparently no separate audio to tape was made at the Hamburg concert. It frankly doesn't sound that bad for TV audio, although at times one occasionally can hear artifacts from aggressive processing of the original and the audience applause is rather brittle sounding. The 1959 Hamburg concert is one of the best visual documents of
Callas in performance, and to fully experience it you need the video. But if you know the video well, and like
Callas' performance well enough to desire it on a compact disc recording, then this is by far the best option.