WHEN it was announced in late June 1989 that Luciano Pavarotti would be singing at Glasgow’s SECC during the city’s reign as European City of Culture, the 1990 festivals office switchboard was jammed with enquiries from eager music-lovers.

In August, our music critic, Michael Tumelty, wrote that his own phone line was swamped “and my mail slot choked with communications from everybody I have ever known - some offering backhanders if I could fix them a ticket.”

Pavarotti, Tumelty continued, transcended all boundaries. “Whatever you think of him, the big man is a superstar, drawing a legion of fans from across the social spectrum. Look at his record sales and TV appearances. We’re talking top-of-the-league entertainment here, not high art”. He suggested that Ibrox stadium might be better able to accommodate all of those who would willingly pay high prices to see Pavarotti.

But the venue remained the SECC. The concert took place on May 16, 1990, the tenor (right) appearing with the Scottish Opera orchestra and chorus. In his review, however, Tumelty made some astute criticisms of the show: the “sloppy amateurism” of the noticeably delayed start; the quality of the sound; Pavarotti coming on with no announcement or presentation, singing a couple of songs, wandering off, coming back on for another song or two, wandering off again... The audience reaction was low-key, the songs were largely unfamiliar; Tumelty heard an audience member murmur “what I just knew a lot of people were thinking: ‘I don’t know any of these.’”

The chorus warmed up the audience in the second half. Pavarotti sang some Italian songs. “Only at the end of the show”, Tumelty wrote, “did the immense audience start the shouting and footstamping - and I can tell you that it’s just as well they did, because from what I heard at half time, the whole thing was so muted that it was by no means certain that Pavarotti was going to do any encores. Anyway, he did. Out came the big tunes - Nessun Dorma and the lot - the tartan hankie and the flowers. And all was well”. (Our letters pages subsequently saw some readers defending the tenor).

Read more: Herald Diary

Pavarotti returned to the SECC in March 1992 (main image). with the Royal Scottish Orchestra and soprano Susan Dunn. Our critic, Kenneth Wright, observed: “... he is the biggest pop star since Presley and Glasgow loves him to death. People get snooty about the great popularisers, but to see [him] as a cynical disher-up of caviar to the general is simply to get it wrong. He was made for audiences to love, a cuddly bear in spectacularly crumpled evening dress singing in a roughly lachrymose tenor the big, sad songs that Glasgow loves the way it loves country and western.”

The heart-wrenchers in the encores climaxed with Nessun Dorma: “the big song came at last: eye-popping, collar-bursting, passion to the max -- and that, as you will have guessed, was only the audience”.