Liva is loving us from Latvia

In an blog last week, Kari offered up a pair of Tosca tickets for answering a trivia question. We got our winner, Liva, but it would been a heck of a trip for her to come all the way to us. See Liva's lovely and interesting response:

Well, I see Tampa is in Florida, USA, it's very far away. I don't have any friend there, I have a few pen-friends in New York, they are my only live connection with United States.

We have a beautiful big opera house, called LNO (Latvian National Opera) in the capital of Latvia, in Riga. Actually, since I became a fan of Pavarotti (about 3 years ago) I immediately fall in love with Puccini's operas, I started to love opera generally. I love Pavarotti's voice, this amazing tenor introduced me to opera deeper, he taught me to listen to it as something very beautiful. I graduated music school two years ago, I'm a pianist, and they taught us about opera, but at that time I didn't take any notice. So now I've really fallen for opera. Love it very much, I go to see opera about once a month.

I have the "google alert" on Luciano Pavarotti's name, and I received an google alert in which I found your blog about Florez (I receive a lot of them since Florez hit those 18 high C's), there was your question about Tosca and Pavarotti and I answered it just for a lark, I new I won't be able to go to that show, because it's a loooong flight to Florida from here, I just couldn't make it.

Honestly, it was the first time I read about you.

Tell me more!

Liva

Nifty - We have a new friend! We hope you keep coming back, Liva, we could use a few more knowledgeable opera buffs on this blog.

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Encore! Encore! No really, encore!

Solo encores have fallen out of favor in the opera. Fairly common in the 19th century, the practice fell out favor when opera became more “serious.”

Buzz killer.

The Met has explicitly banned solo encores for much of the 20th century. In fact, the only one that has been documented was in 1994 (but we’ll get to that in a moment).

14 years later, history was made at the Met when Juan Diego Florez performed a solo encore of the challenging tenor aria “Ah! Mes Amis.” Filled with high C’s this “tenor tester” brought the house to its knees and provided a thrilling moment for all opera lovers. The challenging role is said to launch tenor’s careers at the Met and is credited as being the “star-making” role of Luciano Pavarotti (but we’ll get to that in a moment).

Juan Diego Florez currently stars with Natalie Dessay in a new production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has said that there would be no encore ban on his watch, to make opera “as entertaining and exciting for the audience as it can be.”

Cool.

So back to that 1994 solo encore – any guesses? It was Luciano Pavarotti, singing the second-act tenor aria in Tosca.

If you can name the aria – I have two tickets for you to the Friday night or Sunday matinee performance of Opera Tampa’s Tosca.

-Kari G.

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