The best account of that legendary recording comes from Robert Sutherland, her pianist during the last tour of concerts in 1973-74, who recalled the evenings spent at Callas’s apartment at Avenue Georges Mandel: “We listened to a pirate recording of the Berlin Lucia. She remembered how Karajan angered the soloists by repeating the sextet without warning them. As we listened to the encore she said ‘You can hear how angry I was! And I still had the mad scene to sing! I told him afterwards at dinner that he dare not do that again on me or there would be trouble!’ We listened to the mad scene, an amazing performance. She was visibly impressed. ‘I don’t now how I did it. I just don’t know how - and to think that I wept after that performance because I thought I was so far off my aim.’ I had difficulty in expressing my reaction. Such a combination of controlled technical brilliance and artistic imagination was astounding. I attempted it with, ‘It’s marvellous singing…’ ‘Marvellous? Marvellous?’ She pulled herself up in the sofa. ‘It isn’t marvellous, it’s bloody miraculous!’”

It all began with a coincidence and complicity between Ronald Trisch, the head of the East German music agency, and Horst Lippmann, the West Berlin representative of major American artists. In January 1967, Ella Fitzgerald toured Europe with Duke Ellington and his orchestra. After a concert in West Berlin, January 25 was a day off. They jumped at the chance to organize a somewhat adventurous "detour" for Ella to East Berlin. At 11 p.m. on Wednesday evening, 3,000 people flocked to the Friedrichstadt Palace. This appearance in East Berlin would be the only one of her career. For almost an hour and a half, she treated the audience to some twenty tracks from the other side of the wall, alternating timeless standards with the hits of the moment, from the Beatles to Nancy Sinatra...

On that gloomy afternoon, the two guitarists, alone on stage, decided to brighten up the morosity that reigned. The pieces they played bore titles such as “Janet”, “Babel” and “Petit Nicolas”. It is hard to believe that this varied, well-constructed, polyphonic music was not entirely written down on paper. Philip says, “Nothing is written from beginning to end. I compose the themes and some harmonic bridges. Then we have a chord chart … and that’s it.” The foundations are written; inspiration, taste, fantasy and friendship do the rest. We feel as though we are taking a nonchalant walk through Rio or Miami. The concert is punctuated by thunderous applause.

János Starker, cellist, and György Sebők, pianist, were both born in Hungary early in the twentieth century. They were welcomed into the formidable Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, and emigrated to the USA, where they both held the title of Distinguished Professor at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington. Both heavy smokers and sometimes reputed – unjustly – to be harsh, austere and insensitive to trends, they were drawn to music in all its varieties and fascinated by its many colours. They had one aim only, one noble objective: to showcase the works all composers, as evidenced by this recording made in the legendary Studio 3 of Berlin Radio on 24 October 1963.