What better way to represent that fragility — while also reviving it, in a kind of séance — than a hologram? In the recording that was used, Callas’s singing was chillingly subtle and sad. There were several stretches during Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene that got to me, mostly because the real Callas’s singing on the recording was so honest and revealing. The problem, as it always has been in opera fandom, will be if this specter from the past prevents a full appreciation of the vitality of opera and singing today. Rather than recommend that fledgling operagoers hear Callas’s hologram, I’d tell them to get to the Metropolitan Opera, where Sonya Yoncheva and Anna Netrebko singing “Tosca” this season will tell them much more about what makes opera so endlessly exciting.

Source: New York Times January 15, 2018 19:07 UTC