November 22, 2002

This ain't the Opry, Toto

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist
Luciano Pavarotti
I got a rare Saturday off this past weekend -- usually I'm laboring away helping to bring you your Sunday edition of the Daily Journal -- and what a Saturday I had.
First I must brag on my dear wife. I married better than she did. She got an old country hick and I got a very talented wife from a family of classical musicians.
Her parents were both performers with symphony orchestras and two of her siblings are presently performing in the Baltimore and St. Louis symphonies.
My dear wife Wendy is a 20-year career teacher, but when the muse strikes, she gets out her cello -- her mother's instrument -- and plays some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard. She says it's terrible, but I hear just fine and it is wonderful.
So when a friend offered the chance to get tickets to hear perhaps the last U.S. concert tour of the world's most famous tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, we went up to Raleigh for an evening opera concert at the Entertainment and Sports Arena.
The closest I've ever been to opera before is hearing Leon Helm yodel in The Band's rock tune "Up on Cripple Creek." That's a long way from genuine opera.

N&O critic slams Pavarotti with faint praise

"Pavarotti gave an engaging, competent performance of top faves from the Italian opera repertoire," wrote the News & Observer's opera critic, Susanna Rodell.
You could have fooled me. I thought he sounded simply great as his voice boomed forth from a 60-some-year-old body that could have been a fine football lineman.
I didn't understand a word he said, of course, but foreign language skill wasn't necessary to appreciate the soaring and diving notes of a beautiful human voice.
Pavarotti was accompanied by the Opera Company of North Carolina Orchestra, and I could have listened to them alone all night and been perfectly happy. My sweet wife took me to a concert by the Baltimore Symphony while we were visiting her sister there recently, and it was the first time I had heard live classical music since I was a kid. I love all kinds of music, Bluegrass to rock to Gospel to blues, but being reacquainted to the joys of live classical is just more icing on our sweet marriage.

The skinny ladies sing -- and steal the show

Annalisa Raspagliosi performing with Luciano Pavarotti during the concert at The RBC Center.

After Pavarotti did a couple of numbers, one of his proteges, Renee Monti, came out and sang a couple of unpronounceable (to me) songs. She is a lovely, slim blonde who has a voice like a clear bell pealing across the wide open spaces. Wonderful.
But when the second half of the show started, Pavarotti announced that Monti had a cold -- imagine how good she would sound when she's healthy -- and couldn't go on.
So he introduced his other traveling protege, Annalisa Raspagliosi, a dark-haired beauty not quite as slim as Monti, but a long way from the fat lady of opera fame.
"Annalisa Raspagliosi simply swept in and took over," art critic Rodell wrote. Amen to that. I thought Monti was good, but Raspagliosi just blew my socks off, and everybody else's, too. Pavarotti was upstaged by her powerful voice, or perhaps he was just holding back to let her shine. Who knows? But it was a great show, and during the four encores by Pavarotti, I only shouted (quietly) "Free Bird" once.
That's sort of a rock and bluegrass concert joke. It seems somebody hollers out "Free Bird" at least once at every concert I've been to, so I had to do it just once.
Thank God nobody heard me in the applause for Pavarotti, or I'd have been exposed as the hick from the sticks who came to the city to hear the opera.