He comes from Barcelona

By PETER CALDER

If, as Basil Fawlty kept insisting, Manuel really had been from Barcelona, he wouldn't have talked like that. Under stress - being hit on the head with a frypan, perhaps, or squealing as the proprietor of Fawlty Towers poked his eye - he would have lapsed into his native Catalan, not Spanish.

They speak Spanish in Barcelona only to help the tourists out. And no native is called Jose.

Thus the man the world knows as Jose Carreras is really Josep. Josep Maria Carreras-Coll to be precise. Carreras took the Spanish version of the name during the long dark days of Franco's dictatorship when the Catalans paid for choosing the wrong side in the Civil War by having their language and culture brutally suppressed.

"Catalan people were not allowed to use their Catalan names," explains Carreras, speaking by telephone from Tokyo at the beginning of a tour which will bring him to Auckland this month. "What can I do? In Spain, now, I'm Josep, but around the world it would cause too much confusion so I am Jose."

The decision may seem unusually accommodating: Catalans are, after all, famously and fiercely proud of their cultural uniqueness. But what's evident from even a brief chat with Carreras is that he prizes courtesy above all other virtues.

"I always say that the more Catalan I'm allowed to be the more Spanish I will feel," he says.

Catalonia is also famous as the crucible of Spanish art: Joan Miro and Salvador Dali were Catalans; Picasso, though born in Andalucia, was raised in Barcelona, the city of the visionary architect Antonio Gaudi.

Carreras is part of a noble regional musical tradition, which includes cellist Pablo (really Pau) Casals, and sopranos Victoria de los Angeles and Montserrat Caballe - the latter spotted Carreras' talent early and arranged for his first adult role, in 1970.

"It's true that Catalonia has produced a disproportionate number of artists," agrees Carreras. "We have always been, allow me to say, in the vanguard of the Spanish artistic world."

He attributes the fact to geography: Barcelona's position, near the French border, placed it on a cultural trade route.

"All the civilisations came into the Iberian peninsula through the Mediterranean coast and that gave us a very open vision of the world. We are more European in our mentality than the rest of Spain."

Then, as if sensing he may have given offence, he hastens to qualify the comment. "Please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying we are better than the rest of Spain. Just that perhaps we are different."

This courtly, slightly old-fashioned politeness seems apt for the one of the famous Three Tenors who has always been the least greedy for the limelight. Carreras' self-effacing style prompted a running gag in the television comedy series Seinfeld in which he was referred to after Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo as "the other one". Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he is relaxed about the status and sceptical of the suggestion that it is because - at barely 170cm - he is not, like the others, a larger-than-life, faintly comic figure.

"One of the appeals of the Three Tenors is that we are so different - not just in appearance but in our voices, our personalities, our ways of singing. There is a combination there that apparently works very well. And people enjoy that.

"I think I am a normal type of man. It's true that tenors are usually bigger than I am, they are, well, bigger. But that has not much to do with the size because you are singing with the muscles, not with the fat."

If mass audiences know Carreras as "the other one", opera aficionados know better. In a career stretching back more than 30 years, the tenor has developed a repertoire of more than 60 operatic roles, many of them through a long association with the great German conductor Herbert von Karajan.

His style has always been more lyric than dramatic. Never the leather-lunged fortissimo cliche, he developed an ineffably subtle and expressive style.

"When you're a tenor," he once told an interviewer, "you must start singing in the heart, move up to the head, then let it out through the voice. Your heart, which wants to express a number of emotions, is the point of departure."

By rights, the world should have been robbed of Carreras long ago. In 1987, just after completing a recording of Verdi's Manon Lescaut with Kiri Te Kanawa, the tenor was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Against the odds, after a year of radiation, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, he made a full recovery. A writer for Time magazine remarked at the time that he had emerged from the experience a better singer and a better human being, but Carreras almost audibly shrugs at the suggestion.

"I think I am more aware of human problems. I know how it is to go through something, but I think this comes with age as well, as you become more mature."

It was widely predicted that Carreras' voice - which some critics claimed was already past its best when he fell ill - would not survive the intensive treatment. He elected epidural rather than general anaesthesia for the transplant because he feared that intubation would damage his vocal chords.

"I always had the feeling that if I recovered I would sing again and, thank God, it did not [damage my voice]," he says. "But at the time, when I was fighting for my life, for once, singing was secondary."

Cured, he established the Jose Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation, which has raised - not least through contributions by the man whose name it bears - almost $100 million for leukaemia research. He also suggested to Pavarotti and Domingo a performance at the Soccer World Cup in Italy in 1990 which was as much a celebration of his survival as a World Cup extravaganza, though he makes light of his role as the initiator.

"It was true I suggested it," he says, "but it took a lot of work and courage by others to make it happen. We always thought it was going to be one concert but now there have been 31 in 13 years. This year there have been two in Ohio and Bath and next year we are doing one in Moscow and Mexico City. It has become a sort of phenomenon."

The phenomenon has not pleased all the purists. Australian diva Dame Joan Sutherland was moved to describe it as "a circus" but if Carreras has heard the criticism before, he is far too polite to let on.

"Every opinion has to be respected," he says. "I think what is important is that we were able to bring this music to a much larger audience than before. I am not trying to say we are pioneers, but this is a positive aspect. If somebody doesn't like it, that's okay; I do not agree, but I respect it."

Carreras' performances do not attract universal acclaim. In the Detroit Free Press in 2000, Mark Stryker remarked that a voice which was "in its prime an instrument of plush sensuality and weeping sentiment, can sound as frayed as old twine". But he added that devotees believed in Carreras "the way golf fans still believe in Arnold Palmer, even though he usually shoots a 78 these days".

In any case, those who attend his Auckland and Wellington concerts here (shelling out $125 to $295) will not hear a voice tested to its limits. Although some concerts on this Asia-Pacific tour have been with a full orchestra, the New Zealand performances are "recitals", he says, of songs and lieder, in which he will be accompanied by pianist Lorenzo Bavaj.

"It is a much more intimate type of performance, closer to the audience. I love doing it. It will not be an intellectual programme or rigorous from a stylistic point of view and I hope people will forgive me for being selfish and singing what I like."

The announcement that Luciano Pavarotti will retire on his 70th birthday in October 2005 has not prompted Carreras - who turns 57 next month - to consider a similar move.

"My retirement will come naturally," he says. "I am 13 years younger than Signor Pavarotti, though I have to say he's in fantastic shape; we sang a concert recently and he was singing like a 35-year-old boy. In my case, retirement will come naturally. Time will tell me and people around me will tell me."

In the meantime, he maintains a punishing schedule, even though it means being exposed to the bane of a tenor's life - the conditioned air in hotels and aircraft which dries his throat and subjects him to regular, threatening changes of temperature.

"This is the worst enemy, especially on long flights. I beg the crew to turn the temperature up and I try to cover myself. In Europe it is better but in Asia and the United States they overdo it.

"I try to keep my voice in shape. I exercise and rest my voice when I am going to perform. All of these things are a form of discipline which is important not just for a singer but for all of us."

But he laughs when he hears that Kiri Te Kanawa never shakes hands for fear of infection.

"If she thinks this is a good thing to do, why not? But I think this is to overdo it. If someone wants to shake my hand ... well, I am a very polite man."

Performance

Who: Jose Carreras

Where and when: Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, November 21; Aotea Centre, Auckland, November 23

Win tickets to see Carreras in concert

Courtesy of Corporate Host and NBR New Zealand Opera, we have two double B-reserve passes - each worth $235 - to give away for Jose Carreras' concert in Auckland at the Aotea Centre on November 23. With only 2000 seats available for each concert, and tickets selling fast, this is a rare chance to see one of the world's greatest tenors in action.

To enter, tell us with whom he made a 1987 recording of Manon Lescaut. Write your answer - with your name, address and contact phone number - on the back of an envelope and send it to:

Jose Carreras Contest, The Guide, PO Box 3290, Auckland.

Entries must reach us by November 13. Winners will be announced on November 17.