Anthem In A Minor Key: It's Almost As Cool As Terme di Caracalla For The 1990 World Cup, Almost

Placido Domingo sings the national anthem before the 2007 Major League Soccer Cup, Houston Dynamo vs New England Revolution in DC  (Layton/Getty/AFP)

Comments

[Miguel]

Why is he still doing that?! Doesn't he get enough money from Rolex to cancel out these unnecessary publicity stints?

[Les Mitchell]

I worship Placido, and am amazed at his vocal longevity, his constant study of new roles, and his entire career in general -----surely the greatest career any tenor has ever had in the history of opera. But why he finds it necessary to indulge in this kind of stuff is totally beyond my comprehension.

[Miss Johnson From London]

There's plenty of time to contemplate an intervention when PD starts
showing up singing the anthem (or requests from the floor) at barn raisings, supermarket openings, bar mitzvahs...

[jpcd]

There's a very simple reason jpcd sings for
large crowds: he enjoys singing for a large audience, and a not-too-skimpy fee for that.

Shy and retiring singers don't get to be the richest performers in opera for nothing....
Many women find a $$$ a real turn-on, and I bet jpcd rather enjoys that as well....he's quite human... and a great contributor, humanitarian, and giving person. But he knows what makes the world go 'round!!

[rompicolleone]

I think the guy just likes to sing.
I played the LA Opera performance after 9/11 when the national anthem was instituted before the performance. PD wasn't in the cast that night, but as director of the company he was in the founder's circle.
At first the audience couldn't get it together to sing along -- it felt as if they all had been hit in the gut -- but then after a few moments this really loud tenor voice was louder than the rest of the 3,000 or however many fit in the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion -- and they all realised that although they hadn't come to the performance to hear PD, they got a freebie hearing him sing the anthem full out. And this guy rarely sings full out unless it's a performance.
What I adored hearing him sing were the non-tenor parts to the opera he was conducting when he was preparing the orch in the rehearsals before the sitzprobe. And sometimes in the stuff at the end of an act he would really sing and then apologize by grinning and saying, "Excuse me, I couldn't resist, I am so emotional!"