Unseen 1995 Llangollen Performance To Be Released Internationally As Part Of Pavarotti At 90 Celebrations

This year, as part of the global Pavarotti at 90 celebrations, Mercury Studios unveils a deeply moving new documentary that resurrects a long-forgotten performance by one of the greatest voices in music history.

Pavarotti: The Lost Concert is a 60-minute television documentary built around a remarkable rediscovery: Luciano Pavarotti’s emotional return to the small Welsh town of Llangollen in the summer of 1995, to fulfil a promise he made four decades earlier.

In 1955, a 19-year-old Pavarotti stood on the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod stage performing as part of a choir alongside his father and won his first major international competition. Before leaving, he vowed to return. True to his word, in 1995 and at the height of his fame Pavarotti came back, stepping away from global stadiums to sing once more in a quiet Welsh field, for an audience of just 4,400.

That performance - a rare and intimate moment in the Maestro’s storied career - has remained unseen for nearly 30 years.

Now, for the first time, Pavarotti: The Lost Concert brings this emotional homecoming back to life, combining restored concert footage, intimate archive, and newly commissioned interviews with those who witnessed both performances: the first steps of a legend, and his final return.

“There was something so poetic in the idea that, after conquering the world, Pavarotti chose to honour a promise made in his youth,” said Amy Freshwater, Executive Producer and VP, Catalogue & Acquisitions at Mercury Studios. “We’re privileged to represent Universal Music Group’s vault of performances, but it’s not every day that a concert resurfaces after 20 years by one of the world’s greatest artists. This was a full-circle moment of nostalgia and artistic grace, so we knew the only way to release to the ‘Lost Concert’ was to reveal Luciano’s promise and share the full story with the world.”

This new documentary builds on Mercury Studios’ commitment to preserving and re-presenting extraordinary music moments. As the creative studio behind Universal Music Group’s legendary concert film archive, Mercury oversees more than 2,000 hours of music-focused audiovisual content, restoring and producing releases for a new generation of fans.

Pavarotti: The Lost Concert will premiere to the international market at MIPCOM this autumn, with Mercury Studios also releasing a BluRay edition of the full concert later this year. The film is executive produced by Amy Freshwater for Mercury Studios, Hefin Owen for Rondo Productions (the team behind the original concert), and Mark Wilkinson. Sophie Deveson serves as Edit Producer for Mercury Studios and Amy Greer as Associate Producer for Decca Records.

It forms part of a wider campaign led by Decca Records to mark the tenor’s 90th birthday. Alongside the film, The Lost Concert: Live from Llangollen (1995) will be released in November, followed by Novanta, a 74-track collection spanning Pavarotti’s extraordinary life in music.

Just last month (July 2025), Nicoletta Pavarotti returned to the Llangollen stage - the festival that forms the heart of the documentary’s story - to present the Pavarotti Trophy, honouring the place where her father’s career first began. Now, through Mercury’s restoration and storytelling, this forgotten moment of musical history will finally take its rightful place on the world stage.