yes, giorgio 1935-2007
i have the most amazing recording of luciano pavarotti singing schubert's "ave maria" -- i don't know where it was recorded or how i procured it, but it sits on the bookshelf at my mom's house and is played every holiday season. the acoustics are puzzling. it sounds as though the great tenor is letting loose at someone's holiday house party. the closeness of the space gives his voice a quality that i haven't been able to detect in any other performances that i've heard -- it's intimate and warm and in his careful phrasing you can hear a palpable joy in singing that i don't always hear in the big hall, stadium concert pavarotti.
i was shocked when my browser window opened to its homepage today. in my impatience to check my e-mail i almost stopped it before it loaded (it's not that my computer or my wifi is *that slow; it's more that i'm *that impatient). for some reason i didn't and there was the headline staring me in the face: "luciano pavarotti dies aged 71".
i've never been quiet about stating my preference for the spanish tenor placido domingo, especially in the thick of those heated family debates during the holiday season in which my mother and my grandmother would go head to head and thrash out, once again for the neighbours' listening pleasure, the merits and demerits of "[i]PLAH[/i]-cido", as my mother never tires of saying, and my grandmother's fav, pavarotti. because of this annual holiday tradition (only one in a long line of strange doings that my family considers an essential part of the holidays -- following my grandmother's death in 2000, my aunt has seen fit to uphold custom) the italian tenor is inextricably linked in my mind with some of my fondest memories of my grandmother.
in the popular imagination pavarotti is perhaps most famous for his rendition of puccini's "nessun dorma", a tune that for many is associated with world cup soccer. i'm sure that it's going to get a lot of air time in the next few days on radio stations classical and not. the link below, however, is to a 1990s performance of ave maria, and while it's not the mythic recording i opened this post discussing, it does capture so much of what the song and the singer evoke for me.
i was shocked when my browser window opened to its homepage today. in my impatience to check my e-mail i almost stopped it before it loaded (it's not that my computer or my wifi is *that slow; it's more that i'm *that impatient). for some reason i didn't and there was the headline staring me in the face: "luciano pavarotti dies aged 71".
i've never been quiet about stating my preference for the spanish tenor placido domingo, especially in the thick of those heated family debates during the holiday season in which my mother and my grandmother would go head to head and thrash out, once again for the neighbours' listening pleasure, the merits and demerits of "[i]PLAH[/i]-cido", as my mother never tires of saying, and my grandmother's fav, pavarotti. because of this annual holiday tradition (only one in a long line of strange doings that my family considers an essential part of the holidays -- following my grandmother's death in 2000, my aunt has seen fit to uphold custom) the italian tenor is inextricably linked in my mind with some of my fondest memories of my grandmother.
in the popular imagination pavarotti is perhaps most famous for his rendition of puccini's "nessun dorma", a tune that for many is associated with world cup soccer. i'm sure that it's going to get a lot of air time in the next few days on radio stations classical and not. the link below, however, is to a 1990s performance of ave maria, and while it's not the mythic recording i opened this post discussing, it does capture so much of what the song and the singer evoke for me.
posted by Amanda Bonner at 7:02 a.m.
2 Comments:
The world's a little less beautiful place today, indeed. (But I find Domingo's voice even more compelling; there's an extra warmth there or something for me.)
Even though Pavarotti's not my fav, he will be missed.
I'm with you on Domingo, B! For me it's the veracity of his performance. He's invested in the song he's singing in a way that makes my heart beat just a little bit faster.
Post a Comment
<< Home