4 February 1957: Philip Hope-Wallace of the Manchester Guardian reviews Maria Callas in a performance of Vicenzo Bellini’s Norma at Covent GardenNorma,revived at Covent Garden in 1952 for Maria Meneghini Callas, has been brought back for two performances, and the first of which ended on Saturday in a tumultuous ovation for the Greek,American-born diva. Mme Callas delighted everyone except those who find their admiration for her magnificent and flamboyant assumption of the role constantly disconcerted by faults of vocal emission in this part, as in Aida and the Leonora of ‘Trovatore’ (both seen in London) and likewise in such parts as Lucia and Fedora Mme Callas never fails to hypnotise her audience. She takes the stage as Rachel must have taken it. Visually she is magnificent. Musically she exerts so much will-power and bends art to her fashioning in such an imperious manner that one guesses that even whether she were to whistle the music or play it on a violin instead of vocalising it, or she would still form us hang upon her every phrase.
She is in short,the very antithesis of your canary soprano, your empty unmusical prima donna. And yet those with critical ears can scarcely idiot themselves that she was not often singing sharp on Saturday that her tutta forza was invariably sour and that her climatic tall notes often developed a zagging beat like the sound of a plank being sawn. in addition, and the actual timbre of the voice often sounded nasal and “blocked.” Free emission,the sound of a voice of natural beauty vibrating in perfect harmony - the noise say, made by Mme Flagstad or the late Kathleen Ferrier - was simply not in evidence. But such is Mme Callas’s witchcraft that one was utterly resigned to including her second scene of act 2 among the supreme experiences of opera. Here - but not in the hooty “Casta diva”- Mme Callas abandoned herself with perfect simplicity to the lament, and which echoes the ample cello tune of the orchestra,sitting and singing with her forehead propped on her hand. In the duet “Mira O Norma” (with the stalwart - but no longer young Mme Stignani) she gave proof that whatever one may think of her as a singer or as a voice she is a mighty performer.
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Source: theguardian.com