My father didn’t like opera. When his favorite classical-music radio station aired an opera recording, he would almost invariably turn the dial to his second-favorite classical station. (That’s back when there were multiple dedicated classical-music stations in the New York metro area.)
But he adored Pavarotti. He even went so far as to buy an LP compilation of arias featuring lots of the tenor’s fabled high Cs. I can remember watching a Met telecast of Rigoletto with him one time; during most of the opera, including all of Gilda’s arias, he busied himself with office work, but every time Luciano sang, he would stop what he was doing and gaze open-mouthed at our black-and-white TV.
It’s been a year since Pavarotti died. His voice was, of course, one of stunning natural beauty, a fact referred to by almost everyone quoted on Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias, from soprano Mirella Freni and conductor Richard Bonynge to tenor Juan Diego Flórez and stage director John Copley. read more
His “Nessun dorma” was the twentieth century’s definitive one—the one that launched a thousand imitators.
So it caused a bit of a flurry this week when The Guardian reported on a new book about Luciano Pavarotti that says the tenor was lip-synching a performance of that aria at the 2006 Turin Olympics. Not feeling well enough to perform live, Pavarotti reportedly recorded the aria days before the performance, and the orchestra pre-recorded its parts, too. So the performance that turned out to be the tenor’s last was canned.
“The orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful,” writes conductor Leone Magiera in the book, Pavarotti Visto da Vicino. read more
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