11
Oct
watch the stars which tremble with love and hope
(or: october 11’s honey from the hive)
posted at 6:01 am by brandon in sweet you rock and sweet you roll
Chris Botti — “Nessun Dorma” (from Italia) —
Puccini’s heart-shattering masterpiece is almost certainly the most revered recorded aria of the late Luciano Pavarotti’s career, and the astonishing Aretha Franklin stunned the whole damned world with her impromptu performance on the 1998 Grammy Awards telecast. But if you ask me, Botti’s take — entirely instrumental, yet teeming with rich emotion, with a simple trumpet standing in brilliantly for a standard tenor — is the most staggering, most wrenchingly gorgeous, most luminously alive version to be found.