The Decca label celebrates the late tenor’s 90th birthday with the out-of-print archives of the Llangollen Competition, which he won in 1955 as a member of an amateur choir. “The Lost Concert” also includes the first two recordings of Pavarotti’s career.
Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena in 1935, but he had his first taste of success far from Italy — specifically in Llangollen, a picturesque village in the west of Wales that still has an active steam train line.
Pavarotti traveled to the village in July 1955 to participate in the Eisteddfod Men’s Choir Competition. He was 19 at the time and a member of the Società Corale Gioachino Rossini of Modena, an amateur choir made up of workers from a car factory, office workers, students and his father, Fernando, a baker and also an amateur tenor. “Dad, it’s impossible to sing better than we have,” he told Fernando after performing Jacobus Handl’s In Nomine Jesu that earned them a gold medal. It was so hot in the marquee where the final was held that, when the jury’s decision was announced, the choir’s conductor fainted on stage.
Back in Italy, Pavarotti abandoned his teacher training course and began the musical career that would turn him into one of the most famous tenors of the 20th century. He signed up for singing lessons with Arrigo Pola and, in the 1960s, his Rodolfo de La bohème thrilled the public in London’s Covent Garden, Milan’s La Scala (conducted by Herbert von Karajan) and the Met in New York.