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Author
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Topic: Luciano Pavarotti - 1935-2007
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John Wilson
Film God
Posts: 5438
From: Sydney, Australia.
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 09-06-2007 12:27 AM
From NEWS.com.au
Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71
By staff writers
September 06, 2007 03:10pm
Article from: NEWS.com.au
LUCIANO Pavarotti, one of the greatest tenors of his generation, has died at his home in Modena, his manager says.
"Luciano Pavarotti died one hour ago," manager Terri Robson said in a telephone text message to media.
In an email statement to the Associated Press Robson said Pavarotti died at his home in Modena, Italy, at 5am local time (1pm AEST).
"The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life. In fitting with the approach that characterised his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness," the statement said.
Earlier, family and friends had gathered at the home of the Italian opera star as he lay unconscious and battling kidney failure.
The 71-year-old tenor, who helped bring opera to the masses and performed to vast stadium audiences around the world underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in July 2006.
Pavarotti shot to fame with a stand-in appearance at London's Covent Garden in 1963 and soon had critics gushing about his voluminous voice.
Perhaps his biggest gift to the music world was when he teamed up with Spanish stars Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras at the 1990 soccer World Cup and introduced operatic classics to an estimated 800 million television viewers round the globe.
Sales of opera albums shot up after the gala concert in Rome's Baths of Caracalla and since then Puccini's aria Nessun Dorma from his opera Turandot has been heavily associated with Pavarotti and soccer.
Like most Italian boys, Pavarotti used to dream of being a soccer star.
After the surgery in July last year in New York, he retreated to his Modena villa and had to cancel his first planned public reappearance a few months later.
Taken to hospital with a fever last month, Pavarotti was released on August 25 after undergoing more than two weeks of tests and treatment.
Earlier in his life Pavarotti's parents wanted him to have a steady job and for a while he worked as an insurance salesman and teacher.
But he started singing on the operatic circuit and his big break came thanks to another Italian opera great, Giuseppe di Stefano, who dropped out of a London performance of La Boheme in 1963.
Covent Garden had lined up "this large young man" as a possible stand-in and a star was born.
He went on to perform across Europe before crossing the Atlantic in February 1965 for a production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor in Miami, Florida with Australia's Joan Sutherland as Lucia.
It was with Sutherland in February 1972 that Pavarotti truly came of age, taking Covent Garden and the New York Metropolitan Opera by storm with a sparkling production of another Donizetti favourite, La Fille du Regiment.
He famously hit nine high C notes in a row in Daughter of the Regiment at New York's Metropolitan Opera, which he referred to as "my home".
Thirty years later, Pavarotti was still one of the highest paid classical singers even though his public performances were fewer and further between.
Medical problems beset "Big Luciano" in the final years of his career, forcing him to cancel several dates of his marathon worldwide farewell tour.
With Reuters and AFP
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I had the pleasure of seeing him in concert in Sydney in 1990. When he let go there was no tenor who could come near him. Spine tingling stuff indeed.
RIP.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 09-09-2007 04:25 PM
Of the best who I've mixed live sound for -- Pearl Bailey. She was the earth mother. EVERYONE warmed to her. At the time she was in poor health and when she walked into the building (with none of the usual gaggle of sycophants hanging on, only her driver to carry her bags, she took one look and the stairs to the dressing rooms and told us she just couldn't climb them. The entire crew, including the lighting designer, the sound crew, even the house manager helped build a small dressing room off stage out of stage flats.
She gave a great performance with multiple encores. But during on of the intermissions, she wispered something to her driver who then disappeared. But during the last encore, he returned with kegs of beer, a box full of all kinds of top brands of liquor. Then after she asked that everyone who wanted to autographs to come to the stage where she greated them and spoke to every single person in a line of over 100 and signed their records and such, then she came backstage, and sat down with all of us in her makeshift dressing room and handed out the spirits and joked with us for another hour before she left. It was a night to remember.
There were also nights to forget, but I'll leave that to another thread.
Except, let me recount just this one quick one. We played Mel Torme. To say he was difficult is an understatement, so much so that I was warned by another sound mixer about him a week before he set foot in our theatre. I was young, green and understandably nervous. I tried to be cool. If you don't know Mr. Torme, he's short and how shall we say, "stout." And he's got an Elmer Fudd face. That said, over the talk-back system during rehearsal, I thought I would ease tension by refereing to his well-known nickname, which supposedly made reference to the ultra smooth quality of his vocal style. So I said how great to have "The Velvet Frog" on our stage. I thought this was quite clever of me to work this into the conversation to kind of break the ice. But why did he walk off stage?
His nickname, for those of you too young to know, is "The Velvet FOG." ![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
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