Quick, what do Britney Spears and Luciano Pavarotti have in common? Haven’t been following the news? It’s lip-synching–you know, where a singer gets up on stage, acts as though he or she is singing a song, the people in the audience think the singer is actually singing the song, but really, the singer is moving his or her lips in synch with some recorded music, which is being piped through the sound system.
Spear’s lip-synching shenanigans have been well-documented, but Pavarotti’s lip-synching made the news only recently. It’s just come out that Pavarotti lip-synched his performance of Nessun Dorma for the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin. Although he now has something in common with Spears, the similarities between Pavarotti and Spears don’t run very deep. For one, Pavarotti lip-synched his performance because he was 70 years old and ill–he died about a year later from pancreatic cancer. There are only a few men in the world who can even sing the high notes Pavarotti could sing, much less sing them in the way he could sing them. If I understand the story correctly, Pavarotti recorded the aria he lip-synched at the opening ceremonies a few weeks before he “performed” it. The fact that a 70-year-old could even sing the aria well enough to record it is amazing in itself. Spears lip-synched her performance because, to put it kindly, she’s had trouble managing her fame. I’m sure it’s hard to put in meaningful practice time and be at the top of your game when you’re busy engaging in various sorts of self-destructive behavior.
Anyway, I was amused when I saw the Pavarotti story and made the connection with Spears. I thought I would pass it on.
No surprise there. I watched some of the performances and they were all lip-synced. Even instrument synced. I watched one band and the piano player wasn’t really playing. Needless to say, that kind of ruined the whole performance for me. For some reason I can handle lip-syncing more than instrument-syncing–although both bother me. I have begun to wonder how many concerts are actually ‘real’ now-a-days.