Jose Carreras Photo and Sound Gallery
Part 4 - The Three Tenors
Welcome to the fourth part of my Gallery. Here you can see pictures of Three Tenors and enjoy their voices...
The only thing I want to warn you about: the arias were recorded at the concerts of Three Tenors so sometimes Jose Carreras can not be the first singer. I know that can't be a problem for dedicated fans and real specialists, but I'll try to inform you every time it happens.
If you have not got Real Radio Player you can download it by click on the icon at the bottom of the page.
The Detroit News, 1999 writes:
(NB! - My opinion does not always concur with the newspaper's one. I do not take responsibility for what they've written.)
Luciano Pavarotti is the greatest of the Three
Tenors, the one opera singer alive
who can sell out a 3,000-seat opera house, a
12,000-seat Las Vegas showroom or a
17,000-seat hockey arena on the basis of a promise
that he might emit one of his
famous high C's, or something fairly close.
And with the superstardom have come the glamorous
trappings -- the instantly
recognizable face, the talk show circuit, Chum of Di
status, endorsements for mink and
credit cards, a Hollywood turn (Yes, Giorgio!, no
better for him than Love Me Tender was
for Elvis) and an endless string of appearances at
high-profile charitable events,
anniversaries and grand occasions, the most recent
being the April gala opening of Las
Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort performance arena.
Purists complain it is an undignified way to live
out life for this most excellent singer,
now nearly 64, the greatest tenor since Enrico Caruso.
For the affronted, perhaps the memory of Pavarotti's
extraordinary singing has faded.
But not for me. There was no sound more beautiful,
no singing more exquisite than Pavarotti in his prime,
whether as the ardent suitor Alfredo to Joan
Sutherland's Violetta in La Traviata or the jealous Rodolfo to
Mirella Freni's Mimi in La Boheme.
You can still hear that glorious sound in his
"Nessun Dorma" from Turandot, which became the theme song
for internationally televised coverage of the 1990
World Cup, sparking the aria's popularity around the world.
Placido Domingo was a regular with the New York
City Opera for three years before
his Met debut in 1968. He was the Other Tenor at the
Other Opera House, in the shadow
of Pavarotti, who achieved international fame first.
Domingo is Spanish, not Italian --
born in Madrid and raised in Mexico, the son of
singers who made their living performing
musicals in the Spanish folk style, called zarzuelas.
A thoroughly trained musician, he studied both
piano and conducting as a young man,
and these skills have helped the 58-year-old singer to
plan a gradual transition into
conducting and the business of opera as his voice
begins to lose its endurance.
Domingo already helps run both the Washington and
Los Angeles opera companies,
where he has cajoled generous commitments of money
from donors and of time from
first-class performers who are his friends. Yet he
continues to perform 75 times a year,
adding the occasional new role.
Compared to Pavarotti's lyrical, silvery tenor,
Domingo's is a touch darker and more dramatic. Over the
course of his opera career, he has tackled an
exceptionally wide range of assignments -- all the while moving
steadily but carefully into the weightier parts of
late Verdi and Wagner. One of his greatest roles is Otello, in the
Verdi opera based on Shakespeare.
Domingo remains the archetype of the romantic
opera singer.
The Spanish tenor Jose Carreras has refashioned
his singing career after surviving a
desperate battle with leukaemia.
In 1987, he underwent painful bone-marrow
transplants that saved his life. As a
leukaemia patient, he says, he found strength in
Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto,
which he played over and over while enduring
treatments. The eventual cure gave him a
new motivation -- to raise money for the International
Leukaemia foundation, which he
created in 1988.
His 1989 comeback concert in Barcelona, an
emotional event attended by 150,000,
was by his own assessment "better than any medicine."
The Three Tenors collaboration was Carreras' idea.
A amateur soccer player and avid
fan, he proposed a charity gala in connection with the
World Cup in 1990. Nobody
expected the response to be as electrifying as it was,
and in subsequent appearances,
the tenors were able to enrich their own pockets, with
recent earnings for each in the $1 million range.
Of the three, Carreras performs the least -- a few
high-profile events and recitals annually. But his voice was
once powerfully expressive, favored especially by the
great Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who
captured him in some key recordings of Aida and Carmen.
The big dramatic roles may have been too much too
soon for Carreras, whose voice began to show wear
fairly early. But even today, it can be tenderly
expressive.
The Detroit News, 1999
