At Giants Stadium, a Lineup With 3 Fullbacks, er, Tenors

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. —  The three tenors are Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti; but The 3 Tenors is CarrerasDomingoPavarotti--one marketable entity. Or at least that is how the names were billed at Giants Stadium Saturday night.

It is part of celebrity lore that in 1990 the tenors, all three soccer fans, came together to perform at the World Cup in Rome in part for the sheer extravagance of the gesture, donating most of their profits to charity. When they recreated that concert for the World Cup in Los Angeles two years ago, it was for their own bank accounts, but still they offered the broadcast to the world.

Now it’s a world tour of stadiums, this year into next. The act has been to Tokyo and London; coming up are Munich and Melbourne, Vienna, Gothenburg and Dusseldorf. And this time they are really in it for the money. No soccer, and broadcast strictly pay-per-view.

This kind of stadium concert has generated no end of controversy in the opera world. Supporters claim it builds audiences and brings opera to people who find the form otherwise intimidating. Opponents don’t believe that for a minute.

The skeptic had plenty of ammunition at Giants Stadium, an event downright frightening in its sheer avarice, shameless hype and bad taste. You could practically buy entire 3 Tenors wardrobes (watches, T- shirts in various styles, neckties, caps and scarves). The glossy hyperbolic program book cost $15.

There were all the big-city annoyances. Terrible traffic reputedly backed up for miles an hour before the performance. Many people missed the entire first half of the show. Food concessionaires were so noisy during the program that some ticket-holders almost came to fisticuffs with stadium management, screaming for refunds at intermission because they couldn’t hear over the racket.

Others, however, turned the event into a party. They came early and had tailgate parties, even barbecuing in the parking lot, playing 3 Tenors recordings over their car stereos as background.

The concert itself--with the same tacky stage used in Dodger Stadium, the palm trees looking ludicrous on a New Jersey football field--turned out to be more effective and enjoyable and, yes, operatic than one might have imagined. The repertoire, said to have been a closely guarded secret, was hardly surprising--the usual collection of popular arias and songs that the tenors likely sing in the shower. Still, singing before some 57,000 people, some of whom had paid as much as $500 a ticket, is an undeniably energizing experience for both tenor and listener. It would have simply blown Puccini’s mind to hear the crowd’s response to Pavorotti’s still ringing “Nessun Dorma.”

Pavarotti, in fact, was the news. Although he has been canceling major appearances left and right this spring, he sounded startlingly fresh and vibrant. Always reliable, Domingo was at his heroic best. Only Carreras proved no longer up to the occasion. Never equal in voice or charisma to his two partners, he now compensates with mawkishness and a kind of sympathetic doggedness. James Levine, on hand with his Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, seemed to have a ball.

One watched all of this on large projection screens and heard it over amplification that was loud and clear for the voices, a garbled mess for the orchestra (which made the tenors sound all the more like their legendary forebears on 78 rpm recordings). A reliance upon emotionally overstuffed verismo and operetta also helped in that comparison.

The program was the model of big business efficiency. A tenor on, a tenor off; then each half ending with a Lalo Schrifin-arranged medley of Broadway and Italian song, the tenors arriving together for predictable climactic unison at the end of each number.

Opera this is not, and it is a large step from stadium to opera house, where voices are unamplified and singers aren’t up close on the big screen. But this is also the future, and there is also no turning back from the stadium. It is surely no coincidence that imaginative directors like Peter Sellars have already begun to employ video and amplification in the opera house.

And then there is the theater that you just can’t get anywhere else. For a final encore, the tenors good-naturedly stumbled their way through “New York, New York.” (Despite being in New Jersey, the concert was promoted as a New York event.) In the midst, someone shouted out to people clogging the aisles, “Siddown, ya bums!”