OPERA_______________________________

From the Desk of Ehprem Gourion, Ben Zorab, Judy Goldsmith

Pavarotti's got a brand new bag

The 68-year-old is looking forward to retirement -- but not just yet. SIMON HOUPT reports the famed tenor is a new dad with a new CD of crossover pop songs

Across a spacious living room that seems to float 23 blue-sky storeys above Central Park South, Luciano Pavarotti is slumped at his oversized desk like a corpulent Christ. Arms theatrically cantilevered over high-backed chairs on either side of his frame, his neck and shoulders draped in a paisley Hermes scarf that complements his lime-green shirt, he appears hunkered down, a mountain of a man wedged into place.

At this stage in his career you'd expect that Pavarotti, 68, would be satisfied to stay put, wedged into a role and a place he knows well. He has sung in all of the world's major concert halls, in most of the major roles. He has also done more to popularize opera than perhaps any other singer in history, both in performing with those other two tenors and in hooking up for various charities with pop musicians such as Elton John, Tracy Chapman, Meat Loaf and Bono. But Pavarotti isn't finished evolving. For the first time in 38 years, he's a new dad this year. Baby toys are scattered among the awards and memorabilia ringing this living room, for Alice (Ah-lee-chay), the daughter he had in January with his partner and former personal assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani. And now, two years before he says he will take his final bow, he wants to reach out in a new way to audiences who might not be inclined to come to the opera house.

Last month, Pavarotti issued the crossover disc Ti Adoro, his first album of Italian pop songs. It's either an inspired and fanciful move, an abomination, or both, but the tenor is firm about his opinion of the project: Just because Ti Adoro is filled with lighter songs doesn't mean it is any less musically legitimate than his usual fare. "These songs, this a piece of opera," he says in his mangled English. "Is not a chippy-choopy, superlight, against my feeling. No no no, this music is not a joke. This is music!". This is the music he's talking about: 13 Italian songs written for the attention span of pop radio, larded with the emotional dips and swells of a manipulative Hollywood soundtrack. They range in tone from Il Gladiatore, a stately and mournful aria written but not used for the Oscar-winning film Gladiator, to the title track, a peppy swing number that may strike some as the musical equivalent of Ben & Jen: a PR-inspired marriage of two pugnacious elements better left in their own corners. As part of the marketing push, Pavarotti appears in a video for the song, prancing uncomfortably in front of large-scale letters that spell out PAVASHOW while surrounded by skimpily dressed showgirls.

A Busby Berkeley spectacle with flashes of Fellini, it was directed by Luca Tommasini, who designs and choreographs routines for performers such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Ricky Martin. They love this stuff in Europe. And in North America, too: The album hit No. 2 on the Billboard classical crossover charts last week. Some blends are more successful than others. Caruso, a piece about the final days of the famed tenor Enrico Caruso, features a subtly elegiac guitar track by Jeff Beck that counterbalances Pavarotti's emotional hyperbole. The singer's record company had been trying to get him to record a crossover album for 15 or 20 years. One day, his third daughter Giuliani, 38, brought him a recording of Caruso, which he says convinced him that pop need not be frivolous. He recorded the song two days later, but it took another few years before the album was finished. The problem, Pavarotti says, is that, "I do not like to make an album without two happy songs." So the album is 11 parts grandly tragic and two parts happy, which is roughly how Pavarotti comes across in person, like a deflated court jester caught resting backstage between manic pranks. Weeds of mortality poke through the cracks of his ego. His hair is unnaturally black, his eyebrows two ink smudges above weary eyes. When he speaks, he will pause as if lost in thought.

Sadness rims the lighter moments of his life, including the premature birth of Alice, whose twin brother died shortly after being delivered because of a lack of oxygen in the womb. So when crinkles creep in at the corners of his eyes as he beams about Alice, you can't help but wonder if he is also thinking of the only son he ever had. Which is not to deny he adores his daughter. He waves a hand toward the Baldwin grand piano, on which sits a forest of photo frames holding snapshots from his encounters with the rich and powerful. The five nearest to his desk used to hold pictures of "presidents or super-important people," he boasts. Now, Alice's beatific, intelligent smile fills the frame. "Look at that, she is not a little more than a baby," he murmurs. "But she is investigating you, she is watching you. My God, she is watching you. She just follows everything you do. She is curious, like the father."  He doesn't change or feed Alice, but he sings to her when she is crying: scales, arias, a nursery tune, anything. As long as he sings loudly enough, he says, she'll stop crying.

He has three daughters with his former wife, ranging in age from 38 to 42. "With the other daughters, I was not home enough," he admits, eyes growing grey with the memory. "I understand that at the time, but even more now that I have Alice. She is staying on this table all the day long and we play together. I have never done this with my daughters, I did not have time. I was always arriving one day to change the luggage and leaving." After wandering the world through his career -- he still has homes in New York, Monte Carlo and Modena, Italy, -- Pavarotti is now building a new house in Modena for Nicoletta and Alice, where he will move on his retirement in 2005.

Modena is his hometown and it was where he started singing, inspired by matinees. "I saw all the movies with Mario Lanza," he recalls. "Obviously after that, you go home in front of the mirror and you sing until you explode, just by imitation. I think he was a great inspiration, Mario Lanza. Yeah. Great. "But he is almost ready to pack it in. Although he gets the same satisfaction from performing that he always did, Pavarotti says he has never really enjoyed some of the public aspects of his celebrity life. "I don't even go with happiness to a party," he says. "I prefer to talk here, sitting here, where I am sure I say the truth, because I am myself. If I am there, probably I have to make a little lie, to say to a lady: 'You are the most beautiful person in the world.' " Soon enough, that will be a mere memory. "In two years I'm going to be 70. I say to myself: Stay at home and enjoy your friends while they are all still there. Enjoy reading -- you have never read what you want. Enjoy playing cards, play games, stay with the rest of the relatives that I have. Watch the city better, go out to take a walk in the city. I was never able to do that. I will live a more normal life. Satisfaction? I think so." The Globe.