Freddie’s team had arranged for a massive PA system to be installed in the garden at the Ritz where they met and Freddie played his demo to Montserrat the moment she arrived. “Please arrange it.”īeach arranged a first meeting, at the Ritz hotel in Barcelona.įreddie took with him pianist / arranger, Mike Moran, together with a demo recording they had prepared for Montserrat entitled “Exercises in Free Love” which Freddie had sung in falsetto imitating her voice. “I wish to record with her”, Freddie told an astonished Jim. He was later to play his manager Jim Beach a record of Montserrat Caballé.
However, as impressive as Pavarotti clearly was, it was the mezzo soprano who blew Freddie away. Freddie had heard him on record but never seen him live. One of the most audacious, and groundbreaking musical collaborations of the 80’s, ‘Barcelona’ was for Freddie the embodiment of his long held fantasy of combining rock and opera and realizing his dream of collaborating with the woman of whom he said after first seeing her performing at London’s Royal Opera House in 1981, ‘I have now heard the best voice in the world’.įreddie had gone to the Opera House to see Luciano Pavarotti in Verdi’s ‘Un ballo in maschera’. Sadly Mercury passed away eight months before this could happen.īut the album gave Mercury a million selling record and posthumously a chart topping single when the song Barcelona was chosen by BBC TV as its title music to its coverage of the Olympics. The title was also a tribute to the home city of his beloved recording partner Montserrat Caballé with whom Freddie was captivated and had planned to perform the title song with at the opening of the 1992 Olympics opening ceremony.
The original Barcelona album, named after the Spanish city who would host the Olympics in 1992 and for which Mercury had been asked to write the theme song, was to become the final solo work Mercury would complete. The special anniversary version of the album ‘Barcelona – The Special Edition’ is released September 3, coming around what would have been the singer’s 66 th birthday. Special film on the making of Barcelona – Ģ5 years after the original release of the lead single, Queen singer Freddie Mercury’s most self-defining and personal work, his ‘Barcelona’ album recorded in collaboration with Spanish operatic soprano Montserrat Caballé, is to have a special re-release in an entirely newly orchestrated re-working.
Island Records announce the release on 3rd September 2012 of a special 25th Anniversary edition of Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé’s classic ‘Barcelona’ album. Share the post "Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé’s classic ‘Barcelona’ album re-issued"
0 kommentar(er)
