José Carreras: The Third Tenor Returns to Boston

Spanish superstar tenor José Carreras -- the third of the famous "Three Tenors" (unquestionably the third; whether Pavarotti or Domingo is first is a more open question) -- made his return to Boston after 22 years. This matinee idol with the burnished voice has faced more drastic vicissitudes than most opera stars, blowing his voice out in some inappropriate roles, facing life-threatening leukemia with dignity and heroism, and returning to the stage in triumph. It's amazing he's as good as he is, though somewhat the worse for wear. His short program at a not-quite-sold-out Symphony Hall consisted of "Songs by Opera Composers" (the subject of a recent CD compilation), material of limited vocal extension and narrow stylistic range that for the most part made few demands on the remains of a once glorious and powerful instrument.

The 10 "opera composers," in chronological order from Scarlatti to Puccini, were all either Italian or French. Carreras, perhaps wisely, attempted nothing by Mozart, Wagner, or Richard Strauss. The songs, mostly about love (except for Verdi's ambitious, quasi-operatic "L'esule" -- "The Exile"), sounded more or less alike, no matter the century. The first real glimpse of the Carreras vocal gleam came in the sixth of only eight songs on the first half of the concert, Massenet's "Ouvre tes yeux bleus." Earlier, the voice seemed thin, dry, wavery -- the big high notes (not all that high) strangulated, the trills an embarrassing wobble. There was no smooth legato; he'd shift abruptly between barking and crooning falsetto.

By the second half, his voice began to warm up, and free up. Lyrical passages became more shapely and elegant. Carreras is more appealing than engaging, a reticent communicator who conveys only the most generalized sense of the text (love, joy, sorrow), with little feel for the nuances of individual words and a small repertoire of gestures (hands clasped together, arms sprung out). Eventually he began to sing more directly to the audience.

The repertoire was largely unmomentous, mostly encore pieces. But also mostly unfamiliar. There was a "cold" song, Zandonai's hushed "Notti di neve" ("Snowy nights," with their "white obscurity"), followed by the heat of "August Nights," a quartet of Leoncavallo in French, including two delightful serenades and a preview of the love duet from Pagliacci, and Puccini songs with charming forecasts of Manon Lescaut and the third-act quartet of La bohème.

Carreras's accompanist, Lorenzo Bavaj, was a bit of a stiff; the audience, applauding in advance, seemed to know at least one of the encores better than he did. Then again, that audience -- paying as much as $150 per ticket -- had to buy a glossy $10 program book just to discover Bavaj's name and get an insert that listed the songs (and that sawbuck ripoff provided neither texts nor translations nor any other musical information). Does Carreras's management regard him as anything but a commodity?

So people were paying just under $9 per song. Worth it? In his five encores, his only deviation from the "Songs of Opera Composers" concept, the "old" Carreras (he's only 50) began to give the crowd what it wanted most. He poured it on in two canzoni, Rodgers & Hart's "With a Song in My Heart" (did he know what "Heaven opens its portals to me" means?), and two familiar "sightseeing" songs: "Granada" (my favorite), his only song in his native Spanish (in which he certainly conveyed the sexy meaning of those words, even pointing to the accumulation of bouquets on the piano at the word "rosas"), and, finally (inevitably), "Sorrento," the one song he felt comfortable enough to play around with.

-- Lloyd Schwartz