Saturday is Opera Day at WRTI, and for the centerpiece of our celebration, we’re reaching into the historical vault to retrieve a legendary performance by a pair of legendary performers. Tune in on Nov. 8 at 1 p.m. on 90.1 FM, streaming at wrti.org and on the WRTI app, to hear a classic 1968 recording of La fille du régiment (“The Daughter of the Regiment”), a comic opera in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti, featuring Luciano Pavarotti and Dame Joan Sutherland.
We’re featuring this opera in part as a tribute to Pavarotti, whose 90th birthday we observed on Oct. 12. (He died in 2007, at 71.) One of the most beloved voices of the 20th century, he made an imprint on virtually every major lyric tenor role in Italian opera — but none were more important to his early career than Tonio, the Tyrolean hero of La fille du régiment.
Pavarotti debuted as Tonio at London’s Covent Garden in the summer of 1966, co-starring with Australian soprano Dame Joan Sutherland as Tonio’s love interest, Marie. (Sutherland’s husband, Richard Bonynge, conducted the orchestra.) The previous year, Sutherland had taken Pavarotti on a 40-stop tour of Australia, an experience he considered formative: he recalled those two months as “a great apprenticeship,” in which Sutherland helped him unlock the secrets of using his diaphragm to solidify his vocal technique.
The crackling rapport between Pavarotti, Sutherland, and Bonynge is on full display in the 1968 recording of La fille du régiment that we’re featuring for Opera Day — one of several acclaimed Donizetti recordings they made with the Orchestra and Chorus of Covent Garden in the late ‘60s. In it, they’re joined by Monica Sinclair as The Marquise of Berkenfield, Jules Bruyère as Hortensius, Spiro Malas as Sergeant Sulpice, Eric Garrett as The Corporal, and Edith Coates as The Duchess of Crackentorp.
Pavarotti secured rare stature in the operatic world with the opera’s Act I aria “Ah! Mes Amis,” which features eight high Cs in less than a minute (and an optional ninth that Pavarotti invariably sang). His bravura assurance earned him the moniker “King of the High Cs,” a title he didn’t take lightly. In 1972, his performance of the aria at The Metropolitan Opera received no fewer than 17 curtain calls, spreading word of his triumph far and wide.
And as part of our tribute, don’t miss Pavarotti in Philly — an in-depth look at the mutual love affair between an Italian tenor and an American city, reported by Bruce Hodges with some help from WRTI’s Mike Bolton, and an offstage cameo by Pope John Paul II. Happy Opera Day!
