Disasters on the High Cs
By John Duffus
“I’m really sorry, John. I hate to tell you this. We have to postpone Pavarotti’s December 1989 Hong Kong concert!” The caller was
Tibor Rudas, Luciano Pavarotti’s concert promoter. I was incredulous! This was the second postponement of my first-ever concert with the great Pavarotti. Even worse, the 12,000-seat Hong Kong Coliseum was not available for the new date in 1990 and the concert could only be held in a smaller exhibition centre.
All the extra costs and the loss of 4,000 seats turned what should have been a major profit into little more than break-even. This concerned me greatly as I had counted on the profit to fund much of my small company’s costs over the next year.
After eight years as General Manager of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, I had started a small concert agency, Pacific Images, in 1986. We presented many major artists, including James Galway, Mstislav Rostropovich, Shura Cherkassky, Pinchas Zukerman, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma. But, like everyone, I desperately wanted Pavarotti.
I made a quick 36-hour trip to California, where Rudas was based. While trying unsuccessfully to renegotiate the contract, there were heavy rumblings outside his small office. This was the magnitude 6.9 Santa Cruz earthquake, the worst in the San Francisco area since 1906. I felt my concert was destined never to happen.
The concert did eventually take place in February 1990. Although the profit was tiny, it had opened the door to Rudas, who, despite not being popular in the music business, became very loyal to me. Rudas did not manage Pavarotti. Thanks to an introduction from Decca Records, a handshake deal for Pavarotti’s worldwide management was struck with Herbert Breslin, who ran Herbert Breslin Public Relations, a small but prestigious agency in New York. It soon became evident why Breslin was later described in New York Magazine as “the most loathed man in the music business.”
Rudas and Breslin joined forces in the early 1980s. Rudas was organising events with artists like Frank Sinatra for an Atlantic City casino. But having been a member of the boys’ chorus at the Hungarian State Opera, opera was in his blood. Following several attempts, he truly struck gold after offering Pavarotti US$100,000 for one arena concert. A contract for twenty annual arena concerts soon followed.
Pavarotti’s success in attracting arena audiences and extremely large fees drew the attention of others. One was the “King of Sport”, Mark McCormack, whose company, International Management Group (IMG), had invented the business of sports marketing and athlete representation. Enjoying a round of golf with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, it is alleged that she suggested there were many similarities between representing athletes and musicians. Why not add an Artists Division to his global empire?
McCormack soon realised that fees for artists like Te Kanawa were a fraction of those of most major sports stars. He immediately saw the potential to increase these fees through more aggressive negotiation and especially commercial sponsorships.
McCormack asked for advice from his good friend James Wolfensohn, later to become President of the World Bank. An excellent amateur cellist, Wolfensohn had even taken lessons from Jacqueline du Pré. He thought it was an excellent idea.
So, in 1984, IMG bought the small New York-based Hamlen/Landau Management which became IMG Artists (IMGA). Soon thereafter he asked Charlie Hamlen if he had heard of Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI). Everyone in the business knew it well as it had over 900 artists on its books and exercised a very strong hold over much of the music world. “I’m going to make IMGA bigger than CAMI,” said Mark. Ten years later, as IMGA rapidly expanded worldwide, the phrase became, “I’m going to wipe the floor with CAMI!”
McCormack knew that to secure the expertise required for IMGA, he had to go on the acquisition trail. The following year IMGA opened a branch in London. Realising that Asia, and in particular Japan, would be crucial in generating profits, I was headhunted to become IMGA’s Asian Director based in Tokyo, a city I had come to love after dozens of visits.
Although the subtitle of my book is Disasters on the High Cs, there were many very pleasant and sometimes surprising times. One afternoon I went to Narita airport for my first meeting with José Carreras. In the limousine returning to the city, he said to me, “You know, John. There is one thing I really want to do after the concerts are over. I want to sing in a karaoke bar!” Initially somewhat incredulous, I arranged it. It was fun. He loved the evening and sang more than ten songs.
Of the dozen concerts with Pavarotti in which I was professionally involved, there were disasters aplenty. One concert in Manila was cancelled at four hours’ notice because Pavarotti felt a chill. A second one in Hong Kong was again cancelled, this time at just five days’ notice. The most complex arose organising a Three Tenors concert in Beijing’s Forbidden City in mid-2001.
The Mayor of Beijing wanted a mega project to coincide with the final visit by the Olympic Bidding Committee prior to the host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics being announced. A major Taiwanese company wanted to sponsor an event. I was asked if I could arrange the Three Tenors for a 23 June concert. Rudas told me it was “impossible”.
Three weeks later on a Wednesday morning Rudas asked if my client still wanted the tenors on the June date. After checking and confirming that they did, Rudas went into “last-minute” mode. The tenors could be free but only if the sponsor remitted US$400,000 to his Swiss account by close of business on Friday. No paperwork. It was a goodwill gesture to be deducted from the fee if the concert went ahead!
The concert did go ahead. But when I arrived in Beijing some days in advance, I could find neither the tenors nor Rudas’s entire team. Only later did I learn that when I first called him Rudas already had an agreement for a concert in Seoul on my date. He assumed he could persuade the Seoul organisers to change their date. They did, but the 70,000-seat Seoul Olympic Stadium was only available on the previous evening. So, Rudas arranged for three late-middle-aged tenors to sing two lengthy open-air concerts in the oppressive heat and humidity in two separate countries on consecutive nights. This was near madness, and unfortunately, artistically, Beijing suffered as neither Pavarotti nor Carreras were in particularly good voice.
Having made him the best-known and richest singer in the world, in 2003 Pavarotti fired both Breslin and Rudas. London promoter Harvey Goldsmith stepped in and proposed Pavarotti undertake a “Farewell” world tour in 2005. As part of it, I arranged concerts for December that year in Shanghai, Beijing and Taiwan. Although there had been comments elsewhere about the declining quality of his voice, at my concerts Pavarotti was back almost to his best. The audiences adored him. He adored them back. Unfortunately, none of us were then aware they would be the last concerts he would ever sing.
Discover more behind-the-scenes stories in the second edition of Backstage with Pavarotti and Other Egos: Disasters on the High Cs, available on Amazon from 1 September 2025.
