A Fitting Celebration

Plácido Domingo's Fortieth Anniversary Gala,
reviewed by MARIA NOCKIN

In the fall of 1967, the New York City Opera was on tour. Among the singers who traveled by day and sang at night was the young and very handsome Plácido Domingo, who was just starting to establish his reputation as a tall tenor with a golden voice.

He had made his City Opera début two years earlier when he substituted for an ailing colleague as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. In February of 1966, at the New York State Theater, he sang the title role in the United States première of Alberto Ginastera's Don Rodrigo, to unbounded critical acclaim. It was this same role that he sang on tour at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Opera's gala performance on 18 April 2008 celebrated the great tenor's forty years of singing in that city and they proved right from the beginning that Tinsel Town's opera knows how to give a party. Members of the audience were offered glasses of Spanish champagne as soon as they showed their tickets and there were as many Hollywood stars in evidence as one would expect to see at a movie première. Among the celebrities encountered were Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith and Lily Tomlin. Obviously, opera has become an important part of the Los Angeles social scene.

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