Thread by @VladVexler

You need a capacity tell apart the superficial from the profound to healthily enjoy #Pavarotti.

1967🎼 Covent Garden, 90 second listen: 1/8

A superficial thing delivered on the highest level will sometimes offer you more than a profound thing delivered OK ishly. Here is more, with #Karajan, 1967.
2/8

The superficial musical values you hear ⤴️are all Pavarotti's. The life-affirming luminosity of his sound is astonishing.

But the core musical values are all Karajan's - the rhythmical skeleton, the transitions, the long line. You are getting Karajan's marble columns. 3/8

Pavarotti didn't do core musical values. Unlike #MariaCallas before she lost herself in 1954, unlike #FischerDieskau all his life, Pavarotti didn't offer transitions, the long line, rhythmical progression, on a high level. Never. Not even at his peak. 4/8

Actually one of the Three Tenors did offer these values on a reasonable level - #PlacidoDomingo. Domingo stuffed his recording portfolio with as much POP as Pavarotti, but he wasn't as natural at it as Pavarotti. 5/8

Moreover, Pavarotti wasn't one of those pained figures who aimed at high moral seriousness but ended up offering POP music - that is what happened to #GlennGould. Gould ended up being the village philosopher - he persuaded everybody he was serious, except the serious people. 6/8

Now there is a risk. Hearing Pavarotti at his best (1967-1980) can be so physically immediate, so fresh, that you may think this is what great music making is. After all, what could be more life enhancing? 7/8

But this is the difference between POP and serious music. POP enhances your life; serious music, if everything goes well, transports you.

That is: elevating your life vs. taking you completely out of your life.

8/8 END

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