Word: metropolitan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...street, who may care little about opera, knows Pavarotti as that bearded guy with the boyish grin and the funny accent on the TV commercial for American Express cards. Millions have seen Pavarotti's live performances on public television: the 1978 solo recital from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, for instance, or this week's La Gioconda, winch PBS transmitted from San Francisco across the U.S. and by satellite to Britain and Europe...
...George Cehanovsky, 87, a former baritone at the Metropolitan who has heard most of the great voices of this century, Pavarotti combines the pastosa (soft) beauty of Beniamino Gigli with the effortless high notes of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Others hear echoes of Jussi Bjoerling's silvery refinement. Pavarotti inmself cites a more recent predecessor as a model: Giuseppe di Stefano, who at his best had a burnished, flowing style...
...Sills about their upcoming appearance in I Puritani, arguing that their last-act duet, with its punishing high D-flats for tenor, should be transposed downward. Sills assured him he could hit the notes. "Only if you castrate me," he said. Last year, minutes before Pavarotti's TV recital, Metropolitan Assistant Conductor Gildo Di Nunzio found inm slumped in his dressing room "seeming so alone and terrified. He didn't think he could do it, he wished he could cancel. I wouldn't have been in those shoes for anything...
After Australia, Pavarotti was ready for a string of major debuts: La Scala in 1965, San Francisco in 1967, the Metropolitan in 1968. Although his Met engagement, like most of the others, was in his lucky opera, La Bohème, he caught Hong Kong flu and had to withdraw halfway through the second performance. It took him three years to overcome that anticlimactic beginning at the house. But when he did, in a production of The Daughter of the Regiment with Sutherland, he set New York on its critical ear with a spectacular series of nine high...
...question need not be faced for years. Says Joan Ingpen, artistic administration director of the Metropolitan: "I will bet that he will still be singing in his 50s and 60s." And, she might add, still kissing girls and eating pasta and giving tennis opponents the toilet paper. He may not shift out of high gear, but he obviously intends to go for distance. "A voice gives you a certain mileage, like a car," says San Francisco's Adler. "If you are a good driver, it can go for 100,000 miles." Clearly, Pavarotti is a good driver...