At first The Three Tenors, Paris 1998, recorded live at this summer's World Cup, is enough to make your ears wilt out of four). The Three are well over 50 — after which tenors are often on borrowed time — and Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras seem to be collapsing around the indestructible Placido Domingo.

But the more you're able to meet them on their own vocal terms, the more this recording reverses its fortunes. Mostly absent is the overdriven blunderbuss singing of past concerts. The pop selections aren't as embarrassing as usual: The Paris setting prompted lyrical French songs, which suit these three better than American pop.

Though Pavarotti sounds old — the voice has lost its clean, gleaming surface and fueled-from-within power — he's learned to better capitalize on what he has. For the first time, he sings his signature Nessun Dorma not as a showstopper, but as the interior soliloquy it is. Carreras has more vocal flaws, but no longer tiptoes around them; he seems to have decided that his public will love him no matter how badly he wobbles. Has he ever sung with such abandon? His interpretive ideas are grand and imaginative, even if their execution is haphazard. And Domingo? As much as I've loved him over the years, he's strangely uninteresting here. Two out of three ain't bad.

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