The Melbourne Conservatorium welcomes Professor Giorgio Biancorosso (University of Hong Kong) presenting a Macgeorge Bequest public lecture titled “Doomed to an Eternal Present?: Callas’s Studio Recordings”.

The release of Warner’s Maria Callas: The Complete Studio Recordings, 1949-1969 (2015) provides a unique opportunity to revisit the oft-cited claim that live performances have at times become indistinguishable from their recorded counterparts. Comparisons with live recordings indicate that even when onstage, Callas sought to achieve a level of proficiency such that the performance was no longer the virtuosic realisation of a work but the striving toward an ideal associated with the practice of studio recording. Hence the significance of Callas’s idiosyncratic tone color or breathing, and even her mistakes. By listening to the recordings of her Juilliard School master classes, one regains a sense of Callas’s performances as situated events.