I am a little uneasy about this: an audience with the great Spanish-born tenor Jose Carreras at his leukemia research foundation in Barcelona, sandwiched between the man from the London Times and a journalist from a music magazine, all of us here to celebrate the lifetime achievement award he will be given at the Classical Brits on Thursday, and to discreetly plug his new disc, unenterprisingly titled The Jose Carreras Collection.
In some ways, the meeting is a polite fiction. Take the photograph on the front of the disc — an impossibly handsome thirtysomething with narrowed eyes and immaculate designer stubble. The picture is history, as are the disc’s curious collection of operatic standards and modernish songs, most of which were recorded a decade or more ago.
Even though he retired from the operatic stage in 2002, Carreras insists his career is far from over. “I’m still fully active,” he says. “I’m doing 50 or 60 concerts a year, both orchestral concerts and recitals. I carry on singing because I love it. The closer you are to the end, the more you understand how important it is.” Now 62, he recognizes that the end is approaching — “Next year is going to be 40 years that I am professionally singing, so it may be time” — but he refuses to put a date on when he will quit. He says he will know when the moment comes.
Carreras’ operatic career was shorter than the two other tenors with whom he will forever be linked — Luciano Pavarotti, who was commanding the stage at major opera houses into his mid-60s, and Placido Domingo, who is still taking on new roles at 68. That is because in 1987, Carreras was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Thereafter he had to husband his physical and vocal resources and restrict his appearances. He says the voice was still strong after chemotherapy and a couple of years off; the body less so. “For an artist in any field, it is important to know what are your limits, which is why I sang less opera afterwards,” he explains.
And now? “I don’t have the strength I had 25 years ago. If I could do tomorrow Carmen, or Boheme, or Andrea Chenier, or Il Trovatore, I wouldn’t sing it like 25 years ago. I would be comparing myself with the way I was then and this is not good.” Does he mourn the decline of that instrument? “The voice is like a man, like ourselves: we all feel melancholic about what we have lost, the things we could do when we were young. But having the possibility to still perform is wonderful. The voice loses elasticity as you age, but on the other hand maybe you are more mature as an interpreter, maybe your approach to singing deepens.”
In concert, he can sing material that suits his now more limited vocal resources — Catalan and Neapolitan songs, light opera, popular songs, those hybrid musico-religious numbers beloved of the new breed of tenor-crooners, as well as the odd heavy-duty aria. He has, in any case, always been willing to indulge in crossover — witness his much-criticized West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein in 1985 and his disc of Andrew Lloyd Webber songs in 1990, a step too far for Gramophone magazine, which refused to review it.
Why did he make such records? In the big-selling 1980s and 1990s, he admits, artists were guided by their record companies. But he also offers a more historically grounded defense of crossover. “We follow a certain legacy from important tenors — Caruso, Gigli, Di Stefano. All these singers sang the lighter music of their time; for a tenor, a Neapolitan song is almost like singing La Boheme. It’s a very important part of the repertoire. I didn’t believe in specialized singers — ‘This is a Verdi tenor, this is a Puccini soprano’; I believe in singing well or singing bad, and if you sing well La Boheme and Tosca and Carmen, for sure you have to try the Neapolitan songs, because it’s another way to express yourself.”
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