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[Melodie]

Placido's pit stop

While his partners from the Three Tenors are starting to put their feet up, Placido Domingo has set himself an extraordinary challenge: to sing the lead and conduct in the same opera. Martin Kettle goes behind the scenes at Covent Garden.


Pavarotti has just announced the start of his farewell tour. Carreras now barely performs at all. But Placido Domingo is something else. Of the trio known to millions simply as the Three Tenors, Domingo is the only one who shows no sign of passing the baton to a new generation.

More than that, in fact. Not content with continuing to sing both old roles and new in defiance of his 62 years, Domingo is preparing to embark on another new project. For Domingo is about to sing in an opera - and then to conduct it. Far from passing the baton, he intends to pick the baton up.

The greatest operatic artist of modern times is back in London this month. Next week he will be at Covent Garden performing one of his calling-card roles: the tragic clown Canio in Ruggiero Leoncavallo's indestructible shocker I Pagliacci. He sings it first in a stratospherically expensive fund-raising gala for the Royal Opera House on Monday, followed by four more performances for ordinary mortals, including free live relays around the country on July 16, sponsored by BP.

But it's on Sunday week that things get really interesting artistically. In the afternoon, Domingo sings another Pagliacci matinee. Then, only hours later, it's off with the motley and on to the podium, for the first of three performances in which Domingo conducts his first-ever Pagliacci, with Dennis O'Neill donning the clown's costume up on the stage in his place.

Even by Domingo's standards, this is a groundbreaking career move. He has conducted operas before, of course, including Die Fledermaus and La Traviata at Covent Garden. But never before has Domingo alternated singing and conducting the same opera. Nor has anyone else in modern times. No one I have asked has been able to come up with anything like it at this level.

Domingo's continuing appetite for the new is one of the most extraordinary and most admirable things about him. At the last count, he has sung 119 different roles, a figure unmatched by any tenor in history. He has recorded 97 full-length operas, made more than 50 videos and, in what passes for spare time, he even runs two opera companies, in Los Angeles and Washington.

You might suppose that in the world of opera, what Domingo wants, Domingo gets. And that's true. What opera house management would turn him down? Even so, an arrangement like this would not get very far without the cooperation of Covent Garden's new music director, Antonio Pappano.

"I'm glad they thought of this," Domingo insists. "Placido didn't twist our arm, I promise you," Pappano agrees gamely, as the two men relax after rehearsal in Pappano's office overlooking the busy Covent Garden piazza. As we talk, a high-bouncing trampolinist periodically soars to window- level view from the piazza below.

Well, that's their story, and they're sticking to it. Nevertheless, this new Pagliacci, directed by the legendary veteran Franco Zeffirelli and co-starring singers like Angela Gheorghiu and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who could normally fill an opera house on their own, is very much a joint project, not a battle for the baton.

"It's not a matter of who is in charge," Domingo answers when I pose the inevitable question about who is the boss. "It is a matter of exchange of ideas. Sure, some artists can be difficult, whether they are singers or conductors. The first thing they say on day one of rehearsal is 'No', just so that they can show that they are in command. But with Tony and me, there is just giving and taking. We are just two of many people who are working together on the production."

Pappano agrees. "If you start from a position of knowledge and respect, which we do, then you don't need to ask who is in charge. And therefore it is a question that never needs to be answered."

Well, maybe. It is a good job Sir Alex Ferguson isn't a conductor. But the two men do not have to talk together for long before it is clear that there is an implicit hierarchy even in their collaboration. For even Covent Garden's dynamic music director, now coming to the end of an immensely successful first season at the helm, is more than a little in awe of his fellow conductor and vocal legend.

"If he comes over to me in rehearsal and says that everything I just did is wrong, we can discuss it. Because he is who he is. But if I go to Placido and say, 'What do you think about this?' I never have to think, 'Well, how do I approach him?'

Pappano and Domingo have made recordings together - important recordings of the Wagnerian repertoire into which Domingo has increasingly ventured in the past decade. But until this month, they have given only a single performance together in an opera house. The place was Oslo, the year was 1988 and the occasion was a one-off gala performance of Tosca. The way that Pappano tells it, the collaboration was a truly memorable musical experience.

"I got to Oslo very late. I felt a right idiot, because Placido had got there first. So just before the performance I went into Placido's dressing room, and Placido was at the piano. And so we rehearsed very quickly and the wrong way round. Placido played, and I sang, and we had five minutes and we were done.

"But I'll never forget hearing his voice that first time in the theatre - this is not to flatter him, because it's just true - but when he started the aria in the first act, my God, the whole sound of the orchestra just changed immediately to the sound of that voice. It was quite something. I'm not flattering you, Placido, it was just true."

Fifteen years on, the two men are now more familiar with one another. Further collaborations are planned. Domingo will sing Siegmund in the new Covent Garden Ring cycle under Pappano's baton in two years' time. Domingo may still be who he is, but Pappano is now a thoroughbred too. They work more easily as equals.

"When Tony is conducting and I am singing, he is in command, because he is in the driving place," Domingo says. "If I do something wrong, he will deal with it because he knows I will not do that for capricious reasons. But if there is a mistake, or a wrong entrance, he will be ready to accommodate things. This is the wonderful thing about music."

"The way we work is that we are always talking to each other across the orchestra, going back and forth, feeding each other," Pappano insists. "There is never a feeling that we have to adjourn to a corner and whisper or that there are any secrets. The great generosity of Placido, from a human point of view, is that when he makes music with you, you are doing it together.

"Look, there are very intense, unspoken things going on when he's on stage and I'm trying to understand what he's doing and trying to - I don't like this word - accompany him, or trying to surround him with something that's idiomatic and right. We don't need to talk about that stuff. The language is perfect, the rhythm of the language, the thrust of the language, the acting, the eyes are right. With another singer, you'd have to discuss and say, 'Here, do this, or do that.' Yes, we do that sometimes, but the understanding of the idiom is overwhelmingly unspoken.

"Maybe it's because we've got that Latin thing in common," suggests Pappano, who is London-born, with Italian parents. "If you don't have that slancio [meaning surge or leap], or if you don't have that feeling for the schwung [the German for swing or impetus], it may be harder."

In the musical shaping of this new Pagliacci, Pappano has been the first one at the score face. Even when he is not on stage, Domingo has been sitting in on Pappano's rehearsals and just listening. Mostly, Pappano just takes the orchestra through Leoncavallo's score. Sometimes, the two men stop and confer. "We share information about how I'm beating this, so that when Placido is in front of the orchestra at least he will know what I've done, and why," Pappano says. "It's a very organic way of working."

"It's so beautiful to watch Tony work," Domingo enthuses. "These verismo pieces are more difficult than many people realise. Verismo is not just brutality and brass. It is also very delicate. But you need to have someone who can teach the orchestra these things very clearly. It is important to remember that this Covent Garden orchestra has many musicians who are now playing this work for the first time. This music may sound easy, but it is difficult to play. Tony manages to make the piece very connected in a marvellous way.

"These pieces are dangerous," he warns, however. "You can sometimes give too much. The art is to find the real feeling that is there."

"You can get so carried away," Pappano agrees. "There has to be élan, but there also has to be a sense of control about how much to let loose."

The two men are on a roll now. They start discussing Leoncavallo's reputation and his influences. "It is fascinating that Leoncavallo wrote this piece with such big orchestration, the use of bass clarinet, the bassoons, the trombones and so on," says Domingo. "I have the feeling that Leoncavallo loved deeply Die Walküre. He has a lot of Wagnerian feeling."

"What's fascinating is that he writes tunes that that are memorable, but they don't sound like anyone else's tunes," says Pappano. "They don't sound like they could be written by Puccini, or Giordano or any of the others. With a lot of the writing you can tell that he has written it at the piano. This is someone who had a great facility."

"Some of his arias are unbelievable," Domingo agrees. "Not just in this piece." And to prove the point he decides to sing, from memory, a real rarity, "Tu solo a me rimani, o poesia" from Leoncavallo's first opera, Chatterton, written in 1876, when the composer was 18. Pappano and I applaud enthusiastically. "You've got a recording on your little machine that you can play your grandchildren," Pappano points out later.

Pagliacci is a short opera. Its two acts come in at only around an hour and a quarter, which is why it has so often been performed in a double bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Not in this production, though. That means that top-price tickets, at £160 each, work out at over £2 a minute. If that rate had applied to the Royal Opera's recent Lohengrin, top prices would have exceeded £460 each. Covent Garden is braced for the inevitable condemnation.

"I'm sure there will be a lot of cynicism," Pappano acknowledges. "But Zeffirelli is very very convinced that Pagliacci was not meant to be with Cav. They just happened to be put together. They are operas on their own. This production is conceived on a large scale. And you need an interval merely for that reason."

"People asked this question in Los Angeles and in Washington too, when the production was done there," Domingo adds. "However, once you come to the performance, if you don't want to be difficult about it, you get it. You get a show. You leave the theatre satisfied. Leoncavallo wrote it to be performed on its own."

Nonetheless, Pagliacci is a gruelling work to rehearse and perform. No one who knows their operatic history should be in any doubt about the difficulties. When Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the premiere in 1892 in Milan, got home after the first performance, he threw himself on his bed fully dressed and slept round the clock. For his famous 1965 recording of the opera, Herbert von Karajan spent days of detailed orchestral rehearsal with the La Scala orchestra tutoring the players to adopt his more musical, less histrionic view of the score.

Pappano has been putting himself through something similar before we meet. "Today I was rehearsing with the orchestra, and Placido was sitting with us, and I was rehearsing really some of the most difficult stuff, most technically difficult, most musically difficult. There's no one bar like any other bar. You have to do it over and over again, to find the right way of doing it, to achieve the bowing, why something is not working.

"You have to do those things several times. Today, Placido saw me suffer through finding solutions to difficult musical problems, which can very easily unnerve you. It's very important that Placido saw my trials and tribulations. It just deepens your knowledge to work these things through. You learn something."

I ask a facetious question that I have been storing up. If Domingo can be a conductor, can Pappano ever be a singer? Both men laugh a lot. "Of course I want to go on the stage and sing. Everybody wants to do that, everybody wants to go and sing. My problem is that I don't have the high notes or the low notes."

"Conducting an opera is like being the charioteer in Ben-Hur," Domingo chips in. "It's like holding 10 horses in one hand, and 10 more in the other. You can never predict what is going to happen. I know what I can do, but at this moment it is a relaxation for me that Tony is doing all the difficult work, settling the preparation and the teaching. It is a comfortable thing for me in one way, but I have to come up to his level when it is my turn."

"There will be differences, I am certain, but not all that many," says Pappano. "We start from the same feeling about the piece," says Domingo. "And then we just see."

· I Pagliacci is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 from July 10. Box office: 020-7304 4000. The production will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday July 12 at 6.30pm. The July 16 performance will be relayed live to Covent Garden Piazza and Victoria Park in London, Baltic Square in Gateshead and the Botanic Gardens in Belfast.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,990310,00.html

[Emily]

WOO-HOO!! GO PLACIDO!! God I would LOVE to see this!! Anybody getting the chance to see him do this live?? Lucky people who are!!

Emily
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"It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer."

-Ludwig van Beethoven, "Immortal Beloved"

[Kenzu]

My two favorites: Andrea Bocelli and Placido Domingo. you could hear them on and on and on and on,.......