(#413: 8 September
1990, 1 week; 22 September 1990, 4 weeks)
Track listing: È la
solita storia (Lamento Di Federico)/O paradis/Recondita armonia/ Dein ist mein ganzes Herz/Core 'ngrato
(Catari)/Torna a Surriento/Granada/No puede ser/Improvviso/E lucevan le
stelle/Nessun dorma/Medley (Maria /Tonight/'O Paese d' 'o sole/Cielito lindo/Memory/Ochi
tchorniye/Caminito/La Vie en rose/Mattinata /Wien, Wien, nur du allein/Amapola
/'O sole mio)/Encores: O sole mio/Nessun dorma
(Author’s note: Carreras sings on tracks 1, 6, 8 and 10, Domingo on
tracks 2, 4, 9 and 11, and Pavarotti on tracks 3, 5, 7 and 12. The medley and
encores are performed by all three singers in various combinations)
The facts about this internationalist gesture first: the
concert was recorded in Rome
on 7 June 1990, the eve of the beginning of the Italia 90 World Cup tournament,
on the outside stage of the third-century Baths of Caracalla. The three singers
were backed by the orchestras of the Maggio Musicale Florentino and the Teatro
dell'Opera di Roma – 198 musicians in all, under the baton of Zubin Mehta. Two
Spaniards, one Italian and an Indian. Spirits were high – at one point,
Pavarotti even happily high-fived Carreras as they exchanged places at the
microphone, and there seems to be have been a genuine camaraderie between the
trio and with the audience of six thousand, who end up singing along with the
final “Nessun dorma.” The actual purpose of the concert was to raise funds for
the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation – Carreras himself had
just been successfully treated for the disease, and the event was planned with
the intent of re-introducing Carreras to the musical stage. The concert was
watched on television around the world by an estimated 800 million people. The
night was warm with a clear, starlit sky.
Artistically the music is a mixed bag. Pavarotti continues
to be the most assertive tenor of the three, but Carreras, whom Lena dubbed the concert’s “indie tenor,” might be the
event’s secret star, knowing that the key to a great performance is not to try
too hard. Hence his opening “È la solita storia” is a moving masterclass in
emotional and technical restraint. Domingo, in contrast, sounds like what one
would expect an operatic tenor to sound like; deep, dark, authoritative,
somewhat rhetorical. His “E lucevan le stelle” is rather stiffer than
Pavarotti’s.
The problem, however, which became really apparent while
Carreras was gallivanting his way through “Granada,” is that the soupy orchestration and
style of singing seemed to be drawing us back towards the earliest days of Then Play Long, the time of Rodgers and
Hammerstein and throaty Drury Lane
refrains. As the record progresses, we perhaps regress even further, back to
the age of Caruso and Tauber and the remnants of Viennese operetta, traditional
European folk songs and Victorian parlour ballads. It is as though rock ‘n’
roll never happened.
With the procession of crowd-pleasers and the endless medley
of show tunes and antiquated Zarzuela – not to mention the innate absurdity of
the encores; three voices, individually fine but together migraine-generating,
singing songs about solitude and individual thought – I am not sure that the
Three Tenors phenomenon really ended up having anything to do with music.
Instead the experience is akin to listening to a series of football penalties
or gymnastic exercises; each trying to outsing, go higher than or hold that
high C longer than the others. It certainly has very little to do with what
marketing types at the time deemed “core classical,” all the serious work which
the “strategic classical” stuff (i.e. the Three Tenors, etc.) subsidised.
However, it is perfectly possible for a well-balanced household to say that
they like classical music yet own only this album as evidence of their liking.
But, on this Friday, the implications have now gone beyond
that.
This morning I woke up in a different country, a country
that was different from yesterday. A country which has made it very clear that
they hate me and my family and do not want me, or us, here. A country which has
sacrificed itself on the dual alters of political expediency and deeply
misguided sentimentality. A country whose people are seemingly determined to
drag back the clock to the early fifties, a golden age for nobody except those
who were there and in retrospect. A country which once commanded respect
throughout the world and is now the world’s laughing stock.
Be very clear about what I mean as a “country.” I do not
mean Scotland,
the warm, friendly country which welcomes everyone – Italians very much
included – whose First Minister is now determined to draw up legislation to
permit a second Scottish independence referendum. A First Minister, indeed, who
has also spoken with our new Mayor of London about their “common cause.”
When I think of England,
I do not mean London,
the city in which I have lived for the last three decades and which equally
came out in favour of staying in the European Union. There may also be a case
for an independence referendum here; the actual city of London was very much for Remain, with only
the rotten borough suburbs wanting Leave. Nor do I mean great cities I love
such as Oxford and Brighton,
both of whom likewise rejected calls to go it alone.
But – and I speak as both the son of an immigrant and the
husband of an immigrant – I do not feel that this is “my” country any more. The
people here have given way to their basest notions, encouraged by the
suffocating, one-sided “news” media. A cynic might say that if people base
their vote on what the leader writer of a tabloid tells them rather than their
own, first-hand experience of matters, they get the kind of divisive, gerrymandering
government that they deserve.
Everything good is being drained away – and I don’t just
mean the estimated £350 billion that Britain’s cherished wealthy have
lost in the stock market this morning. Everything that made us better – food,
freedom of movement, art, people – is being snatched away in favour of perhaps
the most unashamedly right-wing government that northern Europe
has seen in eighty years, and I fear for the consequences. More importantly, I
fear for my own safety in this country now. I fear what this country is going
to become.
Don’t worry about me – by the time Boris and Michael get
around to reintroducing workhouses, debtors’ prisons, ducking stools and
concentration camps, I’ll most likely be six feet under, having succumbed to
that dynamic double act Atrial Fibrillation and Dilated Cardiomyopathy,
immediately prior to which I’ll be wondering whether the whole of life hasn’t
been a waste, with everything that I was brought up at home and in school and
university to believe was the right way of doing things having apparently been
sneeringly smashed to pieces by dopey goofheads. And no, you don’t just carry on as before; in
history and especially in Britain,
that has never worked. You have to change
things. Things including the stupid perception of “experts” or intelligent
people generally as Walter the Softie-type easy targets. But who cares? Logic
and reason have been drowned out by the loud shouts of squeaky wheels demanding
their oil. A facility with words is nothing against a “saucy” YouTube vlogger.
Nobody wants to publish books any more, just Celebrity Bonking Garden
Nightmares. Nobody wants even to read
any more, not when they can look at gaudily-coloured pictures, like cats
playing with balls of wool. Dennis the Menace won.
You may reasonably wonder what any of this has to do with
the Three Tenors. Speaking as someone whose idea of “the Three Tenors,” then
and now, involved Sonny Rollins, Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp, what I’m
trying to put across is that this record goes back, quite deliberately, to the
sort of world to which Britain has unaccountably returned today. A world where
caps are doffed, ration books are adhered to, authority is unquestionably
obeyed and teenagers don’t exist, except as Mini-Me versions of their parents.
It’s not a world in which I feel comfortable living, and it is ironic that a
quarter of a century down the line, it should take an enterprise like this –
which never really would have happened without the European Union – to remind
us of what we are suddenly so eager to forget.
