NEW YORK - It is midday in Manhattan, and 30 stories above Park Avenue, one-third of the Three Tenors is trying not to look harried.

He is 36 hours past a concert in Chicago, 18 before a concert in Cincinnati and only eight hours earlier crawled off his chartered Learjet after a flight from Winnipeg. Camera crews are stacking up outside his suite in the Four Seasons, and now the phone, which was supposedly shut off during the interview, is noisily fielding a fax from somewhere in the global empire of operadom.

But José Carreras, now composing himself in black slacks, black shoes, black polo shirt and black print ascot, has known far worse. Eight years ago the most passionate of opera's stellar tenor trio -- whose heartthrob looks and air of emotional vulnerability touched off groupie riots at La Scala and Covent Garden -- was, in the minds of many, left for dead.

He had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a terrifyingly deadly form of cancer that starts in the soupy marrow of the bones where blood is born and with every drop of new blood brings death a little closer.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia can kill you in a matter of days. It gave Carreras a little longer, and in that time the miracles of modern medicine saved his life. The cure took more than 10 months in hospitals on two continents, and you can read something of the pain he suffered in the lines and shadows around his dark and very Spanish eyes.

"But the most remarkable thing, you see, is that I was cured," says Carreras, 48, leaning forward with a small smile of wonder. "You go through the process, very hard and extreme, at the limit of what a human mind or human body can take. And when it's over you go back to a completely normal life. You have no limitations. ... This is a real wonder."

He could also, to his everlasting relief, still sing, and if there's anyone left who hasn't heard how miraculous his voice remains, they can hear him tonight at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The concert, complete with a $500-a-person pre-performance gala, is sponsored jointly by WGMS and the Leukemia Society of America. It will be only his second appearance in Washington since a tumultuous "welcome back" performance in 1989.

Since then, of course, he's become much more than an opera star. His 1990 concert in Rome with Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, conceived in part as a celebration of his return to the concert stage, resulted in the largest-selling classical album in history (13 million copies and climbing) and a Three Tenors mania still sweeping the global marketplace.

Records, videos, Christmas albums, a second concert in Los Angeles (10 million records so far, 5 million videos) and, on tap starting in June: a Three Tenors world tour covering Tokyo, London, Vienna, New York, Gothenburg (Sweden), Munich, Dusseldorf, Toronto, Melbourne and Vancouver, with spinoff TV specials, record albums, T-shirts and, for all we know, theme parks.

Is there any end to this thing?

"Look, we love to do this," he says with a smile. "Nobody will succeed in putting the three of us onstage together if we do not have tremendous fun doing this. ... We believe we are doing something that the people like. ... We have a lot of respect and affection for each other and I think that comes across."

Though he concedes the original Three Tenors concert was a triumph of global marketing, with a repertoire carefully selected to include songs in five languages and timing keyed to the World Cup soccer matches, "there really is a lot of spontaneity when we are together and I think the public recognizes this. People realize that there are three guys who like best in the world to be onstage and sing ... and this makes a special sort of chemistry. Because we are really very different kin ds of singers, very different type of personalities, very different vocal instruments. ... But together it works very well."

It works so well that the Three Tenors World Tour alone -- already virtually sold out -- is expected to gross well in excess of $100 million.

Carreras is a bit defensive about the financial bonanza.

"It's funny but when you talk about opera stars and what they earn, there is always this kind of puritanism. How is it possible they are getting so much? But if you compare us to Hollywood stars, rock and pop singers, models or sports figures, we are at the very bottom of the list. If you see a basketball player makes $12 million, you say he must be the best, but for us it is like there is a corruption. ... How did I bring this up, anyway? I don't like to talk about money."

What's next? Three sopranos? Three mezzos? Carreras doesn't think so.

"With all respect to the sopranos we have today, we would not be talking about the same thing. For one thing, the tenor repertory is one sopranos don't have. We can sing not only opera and classical music but the Neapolitan songs that Caruso used to sing, the show tunes and other well-known songs like Grenada' that were designed for the tenor voice. The soprano repertory is not that broad, and for mezzos it would be even more difficult.

"In addition, besides the professional skills you have to find a combination of people who not only like to work together but have the right personality and chemistry." While he's not suggesting sopranos are necessarily temperamental, Carreras says with an absolutely straight face, finding such a combination "is not easy. Perhaps 30 years ago with Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Joan Sutherland or Montserrat Caballe it might have been possible. But today, while we have wonderful, fantastic sopranos, we do not have, in my opinion, the same sort of explosive and magnetic personalities."

Does he really think Callas and Tebaldi would have shared the same stage?

"Well, if you asked me 10 years ago if Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti would share the stage, I would have said, Never!' "

If Carreras sings like he was born to opera, he was anything but. His father was an anti-Franco French teacher reduced to policing traffic in Barcelona after the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War. His mother was a hairdresser. He grew up in Sants, a working-class suburb of Barcelona where his parents settled after a brief and unsuccessful emigration to Argentina.

His introduction to opera came when he was 6. Attending the weekly double feature at his neighborhood movie theater ("the other feature was probably a John Wayne western"), he found himself watching "The Great Caruso" with Mario Lanza, and after that nothing was ever the same.

"What happened the next day was definitely a shock for my family," he writes in his 1989 autobiography, "Singing From the Soul." "Although I had never heard these arias before, I repeated all of them to perfection. And, more especially, I imitated {Lanza's} style of singing. ...I'd lock myself in the bathroom and sing in the shower for hours. ...My favourite piece was La donna e mobile' from Rigoletto.' "

He sang it in the schoolyard, he sang it on the soccer field. He sang it in his mother's home beauty shop and gleaned tips and applause from her customers. "It became, how do you say, my trademark," he remembers. "And you might think the other boys my own age would make fun of me, but they didn't. They were very supportive. They accepted that this was my dream, to be an opera singer when I grew up, and on every special occasion or birthday party or holiday, they would call for me to sing. They nicknamed me Rigoletto.' "

Had he simply been bewitched by the music of opera, Carreras says, he probably would have followed his same path though "it would have taken longer." What seems to have set the hook with "The Great Caruso" was the theatrical side of opera as well: the sense of glamour and world travel and costumes and makeup.

"And we must not forget either the personality of Mario Lanza. He had great charisma on the screen. I wanted to be like him."

Carreras insists his plunge into opera was not any form of escape.

"I had a very happy and normal childhood, and there was nothing I felt the need to flee from," he says. "It was just a fascination." When the family's first record player appeared in the house, complete with an album of eight Neapolitan songs by Giuseppe Di Stefano, the young José began imitating Di Stefano as well. (Years later when the great Italian tenor heard him sing, he asked Carreras: "Have you perhaps listened to my records?")

Though his parents had no particular interest in opera ("It was a bit much for them, both socially and financially"), they knew enough musically to realize their son was not singing in a childish way -- every note seemed perfect. They started him on piano lessons and then, on the advice of the teacher, entered him in Barcelona's Municipal Conservatory. They also took him, when he was 8, to his first opera: a performance of "Aida" with Renata Tebaldi and Umberto Borso in Barcelona's famous Teatro del Liceo. He sat with his father in the cheapest seats in the highest balcony, Carreras remembers, but "from the moment I crossed the threshold of that theater, I knew it was where I belonged."

Three years later, on Jan. 3, 1958, he sang a child's role there in a performance of "Master Peter's Puppet Show" by Manuel de Falla. The conductor, famous Spanish pianist José Iturbi, told young José's parents their son was born to sing.

And sing he did. Even while his voice was changing and out of control he continued singing, and also haunted the Liceo, cadging passes and treasuring a season ticket his parents gave him as a gift. There in the audience he learned the traditional repertoire from Mozart to Wagner.

In 1964, thanks to an audition with a fellow Catalan, Giacomo Aragall, he began his first serious training. Six years later he auditioned for the Liceo and was offered a small part in a new production of "Norma" with Montserrat Caballe, who became a major patron and friend. The following year, 1971, he won the International Verdi Singing Competition in Parma, Italy, and made his international debut in a concert performance of Donizetti's "Maria Stuarda" at the Festival Hall in London. He wa s an immediate triumph, with critics praising his superbly resonant lyric tenor, fine breath control and careful phrasing.

He joined the New York City Opera the following year and during a 1973 visit to Washington as Cavaradossi in "Tosca" was lauded by Washington Post music critic Paul Hume for having a voice that was clearly "a gift from God." But it will take 20 years, Hume prophesied, to see if José Carreras has the stuff of genuine stardom.

These days, Carreras the Tenor From God is almost subsumed by his identity as the youngest and least known of the Three Tenors. He insists that's not a concern, waving it aside gently with the perspective of a man for whom mortality has reordered a few priorities.

"Look, people talk about there being rivalries among the three of us, but Mr. Domingo has been for me a real, real close friend for many, many years." There have been minor differences in the past, he concedes, "but he showed me his support and affection in moments I really needed it."

In the worst weeks of 1988, he says, as he lay in agony in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, his body wracked by bone marrow extractions and chemotherapy, his mouth and throat so ravaged by fungus infections he couldn't swallow for months, Domingo "flew out to see me and called me every second day. ...That was very, very important to me. And the same for Luciano. ...He would call me and shout in the phone FORZA, CAMPIONE!' {Be strong, champion} and tell me Get well, José, or I have no competition!' This kind of statement was very touching for me ...tremendous for the morale. And it was part of a great wave of affection and solidarity from everyone in the opera world. They were very, very kind to me. And you cannot know how much such things mean at a time like that."

Even today, he says, the women who used to mob his stage door appearances in London and New York contribute "thousands and thousands of dollars" to the José Carreras International Leukemia Foundation he has set up in Barcelona to help cancer victims as others helped him. "These are not wealthy people, but I think they must give up going to the cinema and everything else to send the sort of money they do. They write me to send them a shirt I have worn in a concert. And they make an auction an d send everything to the foundation."

All this, he says, has kindled in Carreras a particular sense of obligation to the public and bonded him in a special way with Pavarotti and Domingo.

"Every time the three of us are alone -- which unhappily doesn't happen very often -- we think how lucky we are to have this idea and this opportunity to perform together," he says. And though the Three Tenors concerts are quite clearly "a very special formula between art and entertainment ...I think many people around the world who might be a little bit interested {in classical music} take this opportunity to come much closer to the real thing. And this is very positive."

Also positive, he says, is the opportunity fame has given him to chart new directions. While he says he never tires of familiar roles like Don José in "Carmen" or Rodolfo in "La Boheme" ("each performance I discover something new"), he's looking forward to breaking new ground in 1998 in Vienna with a little-known opera called "Sly" by Italo-German composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. "This is a tremendous challenge, not only from a vocal but from a character point of view. The tenor is a sort

He also hopes to make his first venture into Wagnerian roles before long. "I may consider Lohengrin,' " he says. "It's very, very demanding, but I would like to do it at least once."

Does he ever worry that the cancer he banished may once again find him and scrap such plans?

"I feel too good to even think about that," he says. "But out of a very difficult period of my life, so many positive things have come that if that happens one day, all these years until then will have been a wonderful gift. ...

"So I always tell anyone suffering from a disease of this kind: If the doctors tell you there is only one chance in a million that you will live, you must grab onto that chance. You must fight with all your determination and know, really know, that that chance can be yours. It was certainly very difficult for me to do that. But now, you see, I have no fear."

Copyright © 1996 The Washington Post