`Three Tenors' In Vancouver For New Year's

Three Tenors fans: Here's the news you've been waiting for.

They're coming. Not to Seattle, unfortunately, but to Vancouver, B.C., a mere hop over the border, on New Year's Eve - Dec. 31, 1996 - with James Levine conducting, at Vancouver's B.C. Place Stadium. That venue and Headquarters Entertainment reportedly beat out Seattle's Kingdome as regional presenter.

Tickets, some 60,000 of them, go on sale 10 a.m. Monday at TicketMaster outlets. Prices were not known at press time.

How to describe the Three Tenors phenomenon? Is there really anybody out there (particularly any watcher of public television) who hasn't caught at least a portion of this trio's meteoric rise from the opera stage to pop-cultural icon?

We are talking lots of exposure and lots of money here, in addition to some very fancy vocal cords. The Three Tenors - Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras - only made a reported $500,000 apiece when they got together for the first time in Rome to help celebrate the 1990 World Cup (they're all avid soccer fans).

That concert, which sold a reported 1.5 million videos and approximately 10 million CDs worldwide, revolutionized music marketing and created a vast international following for the trio. By their reunion in Los Angeles four years later, the owners of the world's three most famous sets of vocal cords received a reported $4 million in advance (not counting royalties and other fees) in an agreement that required 274 pages of contracts.

One nice spinoff of 3T-2 has been the jingling of telephones whenever airings of the concert are scheduled for public TV fundraisers. At KCTS-TV in Seattle, the Los Angeles reunion and its repeated broadcasts broke all pledging records, with $518,984 raised from 4,787 new or renewing subscribers.

A year later, the Three Tenors announced a five-date world tour for this summer, kicking off June 29 in Tokyo, and continuing in London, New Jersey, Munich and Melbourne, all with James Levine conducting.

Ironically, all this hoopla is arriving at a point when all three of the tenors are widely considered to be past their prime. Pavarotti has received mixed reviews recently, partly because of some ill-advised attempts at revisiting difficult operatic roles he sang in his youth. He is 60, and despite some well-publicized cavorting with the latest of many inamoratas, he has health difficulties that affected recent performances.

Domingo, generally considered in the best vocal shape of the three, was born in either 1941 (the usually accepted date) or 1934 (given in such sources as "The New Everyman Dictionary of Music"). Either date puts him near the end of his singing prime.

Carreras, born in 1946, is the youngest of the three but also the most challenged vocally, due partly to the unwise early expansion of his repertoire into heavier roles, and partly to his health crisis (he received a bone-marrow transplant in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson, which saved his life and led to his establishment of an international leukemia foundation).

It was Carreras' return to health, in fact, that spawned the Three Tenors in the first place. All three are friends and supportive colleagues who wanted to celebrate Carreras' recovery with something special, according to Pavarotti in his 1995 autobiography, "Pavarotti: My World." Just how special, the trio clearly had no idea.

Have the Three Tenors led listeners to opera? Yes, in some cases; no, in many more. But they have publicized the art of great singing to a degree unimaginable before 1990.