Mad About Tenors

I'm listening to this CD right now as I write. I love opera. When and how did this happen?  

Mad About Tenors: The Greatest Stars and The Greatest Music according to the CD cover.  This Deutsche Grammophon compilation album gathers many of the current superstars singing the most popular arias.

Placido Doningo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras. Celebrity tenors that dominate their field and have a long legacy of recorded music. 

I love putting this on in the morning while I'm getting breakfast or cleaning up... like today.  There is something about a great aria to get you going in 

the morning. 

I'm not sure when I first started liking opera. It was a gradual process. Probably first heard it in movies. I never watched whole operas on TV and never saw an opera live in a theater. We've had season tickets to the orchestra and for chamber music but never anything with opera. Yet, I was drawn to the tenor singing the aria. I don't really like listening to an entire opera and the woman singing opera does not draw me in like a Pavarotti singing Puccini. Maybe it's because I sang in a choir as a kid.

Pavarotti's album Ti Amo: Puccini's Greatest Love Songs was the first CD of opera arias I became focused on. I listened to this all the time. I never had any opera on vinyl so it was probably at least the late 1980's and more likely the 1990's that I started listening intently to opera. We do have some full opera CDs around but they don't get heard near

as many times as the collections.

I also listen to a lot of other vocal music and have grown to like it more over the years.