Spanish tenor José Carreras sings about everything under the sun, in numerous genres and languages, but remains mum on his love life.

ONCE upon a time, in Barcelona, Spain, there was a six-year-old boy who just could not stop singing. He sang in the bathroom. He poured out his pure, unbroken soprano to the customers in his mother's hairdressing shop.

After watching the movie The Great Caruso, about the famous tenor of the title, he began singing arias from the film. It was then that his mother decided to start him on voice and piano lessons.

Over 60 operatic roles and 150 recordings later, José Carreras is still enthusiastic about his art. The title of his latest album screams that: Pure Passion - a follow-up to his 1995 recording, Passion, which took all the instrumental classics the 52-year-old tenor ever wanted to sing and set them to Italian, Spanish and English lyrics.

The track listing included one Chinese folk song - A Place Far And Far Away - specially for the Asian market. The formula worked: Passion was his biggest-selling solo album, with over 500,000 copies sold worldwide.

So, on Pure passion - released here early this month - Carreras' rich, pliant tenor interprets Rachmaninoff, Wagner and Paul McCartney, and wraps itself, a little shakily, around the Mandarin lyrics of Sorrow Of The Red Beans.

"For sure, it is not easy for someone born in the south of Europe. But the song itself is beautiful and you get involved immediately," the singer tells Life! Over the telephone from Barcelona, where he still lives.

Opera stars are known for having egos as huge as their stage presences. Placido Domingo, Carreras' countryman and fellow tenor, once cancelled an interview in a huff because there was a draught in the room.

But Carreras - the youngest and trimmest of that marketing phenomenon known as The Three Tenors, whose third member is Luciano "Fat Lucy" Pavarotti - is every bit Mr. Nice Guy to this reporter.

Despite having an entire day of back-to-back phone interviews to promote his new album, he begins with a "How are you?", ends with an "All the best" and considers every question shot to him in the allotted 15 minutes.

If there is one thing he could change in his life - Carreras fought off leukaemia at the age of 40 - what would it be?

He laughs good-naturedly. "I think that we all realise that we make mistakes in our professional and personal life. The only thing I hope is not to make the same mistakes again."

What, for him, would make a night of Pure Passion?

"Anything I would do. To be with my friends, to be with my - there is a pause - partner, to go to the opera house, a football match, anything that I do, I do with passion," says the man who divorced his wife of 21 years in 1992 and never remarried.

His Spanish-accented English is impeccable, fumbling over so slightly for the right word - although one wonders if it is out of linguistic deficiency, or his famous reticence about his private life.

The singer with the liquid, expressive eyes and fine boned face has never spoken about the strings of beautiful women he has been associated with over the years - most recently, it was a Polish model, Patrycja Woy-Wojciechoewska.

But one thing he is always ready to talk about is his two grown-up children, Alberto and Julia. "My boy is already a lawyer, 25 years old; my girl is in the university in Barcelona. She is 20," he says, with obvious pride in his voice.

The Three Tenors was conceived at the 1990 soccer World Cup in Rome, Italy to raise money for the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation.

Domingo, now 58, and Pavarotti, 64, were both supportive of their "little brother" during his difficult illness. In one interview Carreras spoke of Pavarotti, who is from Italy, calling him and shouting, "Forza Campione!" ("Have strength, champion!") into the phone.

The trio's first-ever concert together, just before the World Cup final, was a smashing success - 1 billion people saw it on television.

They came together for another concert at the next World Cup in 1994, and two years later, went on a world tour, playing to nearly 300,000 fans. These concerts and the resulting albums have helped popularise opera, and classical music in general, to a mass audience.

Of course, purists have sniffed. Renowned soprano Joan Sutherland, for example, has described The Three Tenors concerts as "a bit of a circus".

Put it to Carreras and his reply is perfectly genial. "Well, I respect every opinion. But I think these types of concerts, brought to a general public that doesn't normally go to the opera house, have a tremendous impact."

Of the three tenors, it is Pavarotti who has become regular bedfellows with the world of pop, dueting in concerts and on benefit albums with the likes of The Spice Girls, Mariah Carey and Boyzone.

Carreras says he, too, is "open to doing these kinds of things". He sang the theme song of the 1994 Barcelona Olympics, Amigos Para Siempre (Friends For Life), with Sarah Brightman, which became a pop chart hit. He has also sung in concerts with Natalie Cole and Diana Ross.

His own personal favourites from the popular repertoire are Frank Sinatra and, more currently, Phil Collins.

These days, Carreras restricts his opera performances to one or two roles a year, the most recent being the title role in Wolf-Ferrari's Sly. Critics have muttered that his voice - at its peak, one of the great lyric tenors - had begun deteriorating even before his illness.

Under the influence of Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, the Spaniard began taking up heavier dramatic roles in the late '70s such as Verdi's Radames, and worked tirelessly.

He could be alluding to having pushed his voice too much when he talks about his "mistakes". When pressed, he chuckles. "I think I would be, how to say, not diplomatic enough if I would tell."

But music remains as much a "hobby", he says, as it is his career. Because of that, one assumes that Carreras would have thrown himself into his singing even if he had lived his life all over again.

"Of course, at my age now, I would do things differently last time, but I think that would be wrong, Everything has to be spontaneous," he says.

ON SOCCER AND THE THREE TENORS:
"We are supporters of three different teams. Pavarotti is supporting an Italian team called Juventus, Domingo is supporting Real Madrid and I support Barcelona. We argue about soccer but we agree about almost everything else."

ON HIS NEW ALBUM, PURE PASSION:
"The classical music lover will know exactly what he is going to get: Beautiful pieces, originally written for orchestras and instruments, now sung by a voice. For audiences who are less familiar with this type of music, let's hope that through the melodies and lyrics, they can go deeper and become classical music lovers."

Bio box: José Carreras
# 1946: Born in Barcelona, Spain
# 1956: First public performance as an eight-year-old on Spanish National Radio
# 1970: First principal adult role in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia opposite soprano Montserrat Caballe
# 1971: Marries ex-wife Mercedes Perez, with whom he has two children, Alberto and Julia
# 1976: Begins association with the late Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan at the Salzburg Festival, Vienna
# 1987: Diagnosed with leukaemia
# 1989: Resumes his career
# 1990: The first Three Tenors Concert in Rome, Italy, before soccer's World Cup final
# 1995: Releases Passion, his best-selling solo album so far.

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