I posted earlier this year Maria Callas’s commercial recording of the “Légende du Paria” from Lakmé by Léo Delibes. (The YouTube clip in the February post has been removed by the user, but here is another iteration of the same recording.)

The clip in today’s post purports to bring us Maria Callas’s 1952 concert performance of the same aria in exceptionally good sound. Two comments: (1) the sound quality is indeed remarkable; and (2) wow, the performance is strikingly similar to the one she set down in 1954 for EMI.

I don’t have the patience to undertake the kind of painstaking repeat listening needed to establish for sure whether today’s clip could be the EMI recording with applause tacked on. (First of all, it’s Delibes, not exactly my cup of tea; and second… well, nothing. I just don’t have it in me.)

Whatever its date or provenance, the performance is astonishing for its accuracy and flair.

In the blog archives I posted a clip of Callas singing in concert the “Bell Song” or “Légende du Paria” from Delibes’s Lakmé.

Today, in keeping with the French theme we have going on (Thomas and, yes, Rufus Wainwright!), I offer you her studio recording of the same aria, made in 1954 under the direction of Tullio Serafin.

John Ardoin, whom I find to be fair and perceptive in his evaluations of Callas’s work, finds this recording cautious, less free, and with “off-center notes” compared with the concert performance, which he deems “stronger in every sense.”

What do you think? For my part, I do not need to hear this music more than, oh, once a decade, but I find the performance staggering. Natalie Dessay sings this music splendidly (I don’t know whether the clip is pre- or post-vocal surgery), but Callas—an Isolde! a Turandot!—seems to toss it off with even greater disinvoltura.