• CD: Herbert von Karajan/Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti: Puccini: La Boheme
• DVD: The Original Three Tenors Concert

Autumn is bittersweet, forever associated with both new prospects -- the beginning of the school year, opera season -- and with reminders of the brevity of life. I had some sense of both beauty and loss on Sunday as I joined the peaceful army of marchers on the annual Unity Walk, an interfaith commemoration of 9/11 and a call to community. The participants progressed from the Washington Hebrew Congregation to the National Cathedral, past other houses of worship, on to the Islamic Center, and finally to the statue of Gandhi on Massachusetts Avenue. Along the way there was music and conversation, sometimes silence, and always someone ready to welcome us with bottles of water or other refreshment.

It seemed there was a similarly peaceful though not understated exodus to the cathedral in Modena, Italy, on Saturday as the world bid a formal goodbye to tenor Luciano Pavarotti. I found it strange to see footage of U2's Bono and former secretary-general of the United Nation Kofi Annan arriving at the funeral, but I had forgotten Pavarotti's various public service efforts, notably concerts to raise money for refugees. How could the world's most famous tenor not lend his voice to a good cause?

But if we can make the case for various rival tenors (and their careers), there is no arguing with the natural beauty of Pavarotti's voice and what that meant to the world of classical music.

Somewhere in my packrat existence I had a program from Lincoln Center, a souvenir of childhood, likely from one of those matinées where I saw my first operas. Among the articles about current productions and singers was a brief reference to a promising tenor named Luciano Pavarotti -- a respectable evaluation, as I recall, not an ecstatic one.

The program is long gone, but you still have your pick of recordings to prove to yourself just how wonderful Pavarotti sounded in his prime. And among the obvious choices is Herbert von Karajan's classic recording of Puccini's La Boheme, featuring Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti in an artistically and emotionally satisfying pairing. The curmudgeons among us will complain that these voices sound too rich and healthy to belong to, respectively, a consumptive seamstress and a starving poet. But this is opera, people, where singers sound gorgeous no matter what dreadful things happen to them.

This is one of Pavarotti's great recordings, well worth a place in your collection. That distinctive voice is youthful and ardent, and the duets with Freni have an ineffable loveliness. There's also a good sense of atmosphere, which provides immediacy to the whole recording, and there's great work from the whole ensemble.

If you are looking for the Pavarotti of the popular imagination, mixing up classical and popular material, preferably with those two other guys, remember that the 1990 Three Tenors concert has now been reissued on DVD, this time packaged as a special deluxe edition called The Original Three Tenors Concert. There are almost 90 minutes of solos, trios, and rivalries from Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras, with conductor Zubin Mehta keeping an eye on the lot of them, and on top of that there's a documentary film, The Impossible Dream, karaoke(!), and other features. Who knows? Maybe it'll inspire the budding opera star at your house.