Two Words, One Answer.
great Pavarotti
 Luciano Pavarotti Color Gallery Wrapped Box Canvas Print (Microphone) $69.99 This is a beautiful stretched canvas print. Total size is approximately 16x16 inches. This stretched box canvas print will look fabulous in any room of your house. Ready to hang, right out of the box!  Great Duets & Trios / Sutherland, Horne, Pavarotti $11.98 All of the singers are past their prime here. Dame Joan must have lost at least half her formidable voice. And her coloratura has slowed down to a slow stroll. You have to hear her when she was the greatest singer the world had ever seen. Pavarotti and Horne are slightly better. But they are also disappointing to my discriminating ears. But if you never heard them when they were supreme, you may still be extremely impressed. They are that good that even when they're past their prime, they still have valid voices. If you never heard Dame Joan when she ruled the operatic world, don't buy this, she will be discredited. However, even if Dame Joan is way past her prime here, if you know how she sounded when she was the Queen of opera, it's still a must buy. Because even though her voice is half gone, she's still Prima Donna Assoluta. But only buy this if you know how she's supposed to sound.  Great Tenor Performances / Pavarotti, Domingo, Alagna, Carreras $19.99 I had the misfortune to view this DVD immediately after "The Voices of Firestone: The Great Tenors". I will be keeping that DVD (Bjoerling is a wonder!), but not this one. Why? Although instructive, there is little to come back to. Although I've enjoyed other performances by all these tenors, (except Max-Rene Cosotti, previously unknown to me) I would not characterize these performances as among their best work: Bonisolli, Aragall and Atlantov sound "dry" and effortful and those tenors look uncomfortable as well. Cosotti either slows down the fioritura, aspirates every note or slides through the difficult places in the Rossini aria. I would be very happy to encounter Shicoff's Rodolfo and Alfredo in the theater, but they are not memorable enough to warrant permanent commitment to DVD. (This is true, though, of many, many performances on CD and DVD.) A couple of the selections are not really "arias" in the usual sense: Vickers' singing the lament from Samson et Dalila and Alagna's Don Carlos confronting his father immediately after the death of Posa. Both snippets were fascinating and piqued my interest in seeing the entire performances on DVD, but they seem out of place in this collection. In my opinon the best performances on this DVD come from Domingo, Ainsley, Carreras and Pavarotti - in that order. Pavarotti and Carreras sing well, but end their Verdi arias loudly in spite of Verdi's "piano" (soft) marking. Both were capable of singing softly when these preformances were taped and Pavarotti adds unnecessary vowels at the ends of words which do not end in vowels. Carreras' performance of the first act aria from Andrea Chenier is well sung and well characterized. (The costumes are gorgeous.) Ainsley sings "Dalla sua pace" beautifully (in an oddly stark and static staging). Domingo, who - lucky for us - is alloted three arias, demonstrates why he is a world-class singer. His technique, musicianship and characterization all work in sync to provide the kind of performance worth hearing and seeing many times over. If that were true of all - or even most - of the performances on this disc we would be fortunate indeed. |
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