Maria Meneghini Callas's musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina. Most monophonic EMI recordings in the early 1950s were taped on an EMI BTR I (BTR standing for British Tape Recorder) running at 30 inches per second (76cm/s) and these Callas master tapes are no exception. This created a problem for us because there exist no half-inch mono recording heads. So for our original master tape, we decided to copy the first generation master tapes at 30 ips (in order not to compress the signal by ‘downsizing’ it to 15ips) and to copy the signal onto one of the two tracks of the half-inch stereo recording heads of the Studer A-80.
When you hear the results you will be stunned by the incredible purity of tone of Callas's high register and by the unbelievable magic of the middle range of her voice. This is one of the great Callas recordings when her voice was at its most flexible, extended and technically solid.
