Luciano Pavarotti Archives - Wolfie Wolfgang

My pilgrimage by sea to Pesaro on the Adriatic coast

wolf01 — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 10:32:00 +0000

I boarded the good ship Queen Elizabeth for the last trip I took away from the little rented house in the Italian village Gabicce Monte. I was on a pilgrimage, traveling along the Adriatic coast from the little Gabicce-Cattolica harbour to Pesaro, the capital of the Pesaro-Urbino province of the region known as Le Marche. Fishing is still an important industry in these parts so it seemed only proper to spend some of my holiday on the water even if it was only for a short trip along the coast.

Pesaro and Rimini had a long history of enmity in the glory days of the Italian city states and, during this holiday, I kept coming across the cultural remains of those warring families, the Malatestas, Montefeltros, and Sforzas, all, at different times in their lives either allies or enemies of successive popes who finally united the whole region into what became the Papal States. I however, put that glorious and blood-thirsty era of the Italian Renaissance behind me as I could only spend forty minutes in Pesaro before the Queen Elizabeth returned back down the coast. I only had time for my pilgrimage.

The voyage itself was entertainment enough with the opportunity to see the Adriatic coastline…

…to enjoy the sunshine…

..or even, for some, to have a little siesta. I thought of Luciano Pavarotti as we sailed past the beaches near the site of his Pesaro holiday villa.

The great tenor, still sadly missed after his death in 2007, holidayed happily here for many years and, on this brightly sunny day, his equally sunny personality lingered in my mind. His voice was one of the great wonders of the century and it sung in my head as I thought about the object of my pilgrimage.

Some of the Queen Elizabeth’s crew were preparing our lunch. They were merrily gutting sardines freshly caught that morning.

Sardine guts are a favourite with Adriatic seagulls so they followed in our wake greedily fighting for their lunch.

Maybe I was hungry but watching them feast reminded me of the many excellent meals that I had had since visiting these parts thanks to this sea and the men who go out in their boats.

I had to wait until the return voyage before I was served these delicious and unpretentiously presented grilled sardines reminding me how fish never tastes quite so exhilarating as when it’s consumed on board ship. They were served with an equally no-nonsense plastic cup of sparkling white Lambrusco.

After lunch there was dancing to jaunty Italian accordion music where the highly versatile crew, after their stint at fishing, gutting and waiting at table, took on the role of lounge lizard and encouraged the female passengers to join them in a lively waltz. I escaped this fate and stuck with the Lambrusco and a conversation with a Sicilian farmer called Salvatore on holiday here from Bedfordshire, UK, who insisted that England would have fun like this too if we only had the weather.

It was unfair on Pesaro that I had such little time to see it but I was a man on a mission so I requisitioned a taxi with a willing young driver, himself a singer who told me he was a major fan of The Beatles and he even invited me to go to his gig at a hotel back in Cattolica that night.

That wasn’t possible but he understood the urgency so we sped merrily along to the house that I wanted to see.

La Casa Rossini may not be a Renaissance palace or an impressive 15th Century cathedral but this, relatively humble house was the birthplace of one of my favourite composers, the very popular but still much under-rated Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792 – 1868).

Gioachino Rossini (1792 -1868)

Rossini, the 19th Century’s Mozart, was the composer of operas such as his ebullient comedy, The Barber of Seville (1816), so successful that it has probably always been performed somewhere in the world since its first performance nearly two hundred years ago. I also love his ironically suave comic opera, The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813), his seriously dramatic Semiramide (1823) with roles so demanding in virtuoso technique that I have only heard it sung convincingly once and, finally, the piece that revolutionised grand opera and gave us the most well-known of all overtures, William Tell (1829). There is much much more but, fan that I am, I will not bore you with too long a list.

I have a particular love for his neurotic mix of the joyful and the disturbing, his sense of humour and for the extraordinary things he can do without straying too far away from the basic tenets of early 19th Century harmony. In the end, we all love his music because it is bewitchingly beautiful and yet very exciting.

I was here to pay my respects to one of the great heroes of my formative years.

The house is now a Rossini museum with his manuscripts and lithographs and busts of the great man at very stages of his career. For me, though, it was enough just to come to the place where he was born and to conjure up his spirit, as I could here, on my own, with a little help from the piped music from recordings of his operas. Now that’s what I call Musak – if only all elevator music could sound like this.

The taxi was waiting outside so there was no time to linger but, short though the visit was, it was a memorable moment in the life of this musical fanatic.

Pesaro hosts the annual Rossini Opera Festival (10 -23 August 2013) and one year I am determined to attend. If any of you can get there this summer, the phenomenal Juan Diego Flores will be there performing in William Tell. http://www.rossinioperafestival.it/?IDC=3

I won’t be able to go but I was happy enough to have visited la Casa Rossini and to return to the little house in Gabicce Monte for my last day in Italy this year

It was pleasure enough to sit in the little courtyard with a glass of wine watching the full Moon.

Next morning, I took the train across Emilia-Romagna to Bologna…

..and a flight back to England from Bologna Airport.

I lied when I went through the nothing to declare door at London Gatwick Airport. There was so much I could have declared about my time on the Adriatic coast if anyone there had wanted to listen. I’ve tried to do that here in these blogs hoping to persuade some of you that this region of Italy is truly well worth visiting.

I feel I should bring these Italian blogs to a musical conclusion and, after my sailing trip to Pesaro, there really is no option than to bring together Signor Rossini and Signor Pavarotti. Luciano Pavarotti sings with wonderful nonchalance in this 1988 performance at New York’s Lincoln Center with a masterly James Levine on the piano. Listening to this music and that wonderful voice, I don’t feel like I’ve left the Italian sunshine behind. Here it is – Rossini’s La Danza:

It would be a very unusual Pavarotti recital without an encore so, here we go, more Luciano and, yes, more Rossini from the same recital. This time Rossini’s La Promesa:

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Forgive me, body, for I have sinned.

wolf01 — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:34:00 +0000

It wasn’t my fault. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I won’t do it again – well, not for a bit.

A friend donated some home-laid eggs from his young hens and they just wouldn’t wait and they were the perfect accompaniment to some left over bacon that had been bought for a posher and much healthier meal. Anyway, I am usually a muesli-breakfaster but, as Oscar Wilde said, I can resist anything except temptation.

The good old English breakfast, or American breakfast, or Irish breakfast, God it tasted good.

I will have to compensate for the pleasure though.

If I confess then it might help my soul but the penance might have to be more vigorous than a few Hail Marys. I think I should go on a run.

Funnily enough, I had to run to the station the other day and arrived feeling refreshed and invigorated. I realized that I had missed running and thought I might take it up again.

Maybe I could pretend it was a penance when really I wanted to do it anyway.

I have always liked confessionals.

So, on to those Hail Marys. Appropriate I think after such an indulgent and fattening breakfast to make penance with the big man himself and another guilty pleasure. I’m talking Luciano Pavarotti of course and his wonderfully sincere if sugary version of Ave Maria: the voice perfectly produced, the diction immaculate and the phrasing more glorious even than eggs and bacon. Have I just sinned again?

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Viva l’Italia! – wolfie is learning Italian.

wolf01 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:01:00 +0000

“Ieri sera ho iniziato un corso di 20 settimane in lingua italiana presso l’Università
del Sussex” – or, in plain English, last night I started a twenty week course in Italian at Sussex University which is only a five minute train journey from my home in Lewes.

I have always loved Italy and Italian culture and can, as they say, “get by” in Italian whenever I go there but now I have decided to take this seriously and to try and become fluent in speaking, reading and writing Italian – wish me luck. “Wolfie buona fortuna!”

I had Italian lessons when I studied singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London a long time ago and I have always listened to Italian opera with a passion so I do have a weirdly melodramatic grasp on every day Italian even if a raise the odd smile with some of my phrases. It is amazing how far you can get with a basic working knowledge of the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi and Puccini. Now it is time to get a bit more down to earth. So far so good but it is going to be hard work.

Before then though, here are Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland in the love duet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor but I shall try to loose some of my Australian-Italian accent learnt during my boyhood obsession for Sutherland’s opera recordings. Pavarotti, of course, sang it like a native.

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My schoolboy crush on an Australian singer called Joan Sutherland

wolf01 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:24:00 +0000

I was an excitable schoolboy living in exciting times and I must have had a thing about groups beginning with the letter B. There was The Beatles, of course, the band that turned me on, tuned me in and so nearly drove me to dropping out, but that wasn’t the only exciting music for this strange English boy. There were also the Barenboims, the brilliant young pianist Daniel Barenboim and his charismatic young cellist wife Jacqueline Du Pre who rolled with Beethoven and lit up Elgar, and then there was Pierre Boulez, the avant garde French composer and conductor who was regularly conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra at The Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall thrilling me immediately and permanently with the works of Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Webern and, yes, even Schoenberg.

I was very lucky too to witness the great showman himself, one Leonard Bernstein who not only set me dancing to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony but who also introduced me to the symphonies of one of my other youthful obsessions, Gustave Mahler.

…and then there were The Bonynges! What can I say about them without convincing you that I was a deranged and obsessive kid who needed a spell in the army to knock some sense into him. Believe it or not, that is what my godfather told my father but that is another story. The Bonynges (dramatic coloratura soprano beyond compare, Joan Sutherland and her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge) were my principal obsession for more years than I am willing to admit.

I discovered opera early and might have been a walk-over for any average opera singer singing Puccini and Verdi, if I hadn’t, one day, on the radio, heard this voice. Was it a human? that was my first reation. Had it been “improved”by some electronic wizardry, I wondered. Whatever it was, it stunned me and excited me in a way that no other music had ever managed before except maybe a tune called Zambezi that I used to beg my father to play when I was aged about three. The singer was, of course, Joan Sutherland, who died on Sunday, and the music was the aria “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s opera Norma. People argue to this day about who was the greatest 20th. century Norma, one of opera’s most difficult roles, was it Maria Callas or was it Joan Sutherland? Well, for you opera nerds out there, I would say it was neither! I think the American soprano Rosa Ponselle combined all the qualities and techniques needed in this ferociously difficult masterpiece when she performed it in the early decades of the last century…just listen to her records if you don’t believe me. But, for sheer vocal beauty and perfect technique, Joan Sutherland was queen of them all. I was extremely fortunate to have heard her perform Norma twice in the theatre – especially as she was partnered on both occasions by another of the “Bonynges”, the American mezzo soprano, Marilyn Horne. Here though is Sutherland performing “Casta Diva” in the days of black and white telecasts with very small choruses and terrible sound. It still blows my socks off.

So I was bitten by the so-called Bel Canto bug especially when the Bonynges were performing the operas by the early 19th. Italian composers, Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. Joan Sutherland, exciting on record was sensational when heard live. The voice was not only perfectly controlled, thrillingly virtuosic with its trills and roulades but it was also capable of reaching high notes that I didn’t realize singers even dreamed about and it was, something not always apparent on record, a gigantically big voice. When I first heard her in concert, at the Royal Albert Hall, in a seat that was practically in the ceiling, I could hear every note pinning me to the wall. I will never forget it.

So I went to everything that The Bonynges performed in Britain at that time, largely an unfamiliar repertoire and, as far as I was concerned they could do no wrong. There was Norma with Marilyn Horne and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment with a young and relatively thin, Italian tenor called Luciano Pavarotti who brought the house down and became an instant star with his stunning sequences of top C’s. Sutherland was never worried about being over-shadowed by other great singers so Horne and Pavarotti were, as far as I was concerned, part of The Bonynge band.

I was a schoolboy, remember, and my enthusiasm did, eventually get me into trouble. All that hanging around the stage door at Covent Garden paid off for the enthusiastic young autograph collector but signed programmes soon paled into insignificance. After one performance of The Daughter of the Regiment which I attended in my “sunday suit,” I was inspired to ask Joan Sutherland to sign the back of my starched collar and for her husband Richard Bonynge to sign my shirt cuff. They obliged because they liked to encourage my enthusiasm, I thought, even though Sutherland did throw me quite an “old fashioned” look. I wore the trophy the next day, Sunday, for school chapel. I was singing in the choir and had forgotten that I was seated directly in front of the head master’s wife who was definitely not amused so I suffered, and celebrated, my first piece of operatic martyrdom, when I was sentenced to two hours “detention”. I have that grubby shirt collar and cuff to this day and, significantly I like to think, I cannot even remember the headmaster’s name.

Singing was my passion in those days – especially as I was lucky enough to be a tenor. Whilst still a schoolboy I was asked to sing the tenor solos in Handel’s Messiah. It was my first time singing with an orchestra and I was very excited and more than just a little stage-struck. It also happened, by coincidence that The Bonynges were back in London doing their rather unconventionally bel canto version of Messiah too. I got a ticket, loved it and went to the stage door with my copy of the vocal score and asked Sutherland to write me a message on the page before my first entry. She obliged and wrote a note wishing me luck with my first “tenor effort.” Joan Sutherland’s message was in front of me as I stood up that night with the chorus and orchestra behind me, a large audience in front of me and my heart in my throat. Naturally, that score is still a prized possession.

My school days were memorable for many reasons but there will always be something special about my experiences with The Bonynges, the performances already mentioned but, maybe more than any of them, a concert performance of Rossini’s, at that time, unknown opera, Semiramide, with Sutherland as the Babylonian Queen and Marilyn Horne, improbably but magnificently, as her heroic son Arsace. to this day, I have not heard singing of such supreme quality or excitement. So forgive the video tape damage on this antique recording, you won’t hear the like of these singers again:

I went on to work in television some years later and with my arts television hat on, I had a number of further meetings with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge. I was always trying to make a programme with them before Sutherland’s voice deteriorated but it was not to be. I had, though, a memorable dinner with them in London, where a few whiskeys got me going about my youthful excesses and, many years later I visited them at their home in Switzerland, where, sadly Dame Joan died this week. She had retired from singing at that stage but, still talking about singing, the Bonynges and me, Joan Sutherland, sitting in a chair next to mine, demonstrated what she meant by breath control, and, sitting upright in her seat, she took one of her epic breaths and sent forth, for the last time in my life, a phrase both perfectly controlled and still full of beauty.

My last meeting was in San Francisco, where now no longer a schoolboy but an executive producer, I was making a co-production with American television of a gala concert celebrating the reopening of the San Francisco Opera House. Sutherland was merely making a presentation, wearing an evening dress that one journalist said was as big as Australia, Richard Bonynge was conducting and Marilyn Horne was singing. Not long afterwards I decided to leave the world of television behind me but not before recognising how lucky that schoolboy was that he could have seen and heard such things and yet still managed to carry his obsessions into his working life.

In that morbid way that obsessives have, I have dreaded this day for a long time. The day that the World no longer has Joan Sutherland – supreme singer, quirky lady and shy private person. I shall miss her. If you haven’t seen it before, and you are still with me now, you can’t go without seeing what all the fuss was about when she gave that sensational performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. As they say in programme notes, on her wedding night, Lucia murders her husband and goes mad. Sutherland was born for the part and will always be remembered for it.

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