Three Tenors' San Jose concert is nowhere near a sellout.
Does this mean the concept has grown stale?

Has the popularity of the Three Tenors passed its peak?

Has the classical act of the century caught a mild case of a millennium bug?

A little of both may be surmised from the way tickets are selling for the Tenors' San Jose Arena concert Dec. 29.

Sales of the usually red-hot ticket have been sluggish, and more than a quarter of the 16,000 tickets remain to hear Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras in their first appearance together in Silicon Valley.

Selling almost 12,000 seats is nothing to scoff at, notes arena chief operating officer Frank Jirik, who opened the box office for the event Sept. 23.

But he concedes disappointment. "People don't seem to realize this isn't going to happen again. This is your only chance to see, together, the greatest talent in the world, San Jose!" Jirik exclaimed last week.

The arena appearance has been billed as "the most intimate" ever given by the Tenors -- because it is their first indoor performance in the States. The artists have sung at four other arenas -- all outdoor venues -- in the United States. In July, 35,000 fans heard Pavarotti and pals at Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Tickets ranged from $50 to $750, and the lower-priced seats sold out swiftly.

In Silicon Valley, Jirik blamed the timing -- two days before New Year's Eve -- for sluggish sales. Three Tenors promoter Tibor Rudas agreed.

"The No. 1 reason (it's not already sold out) is the timing," Rudas said from London last week.

No. 2? "I think for this area, the tickets are priced too high," said the impresario, who of course agreed to the pricing structure. Arena admission starts at $100 and rises to $385. This is close to the top price for Barbra Streisand, who gave two performances at the arena five summers back. Rudas said: "We thought we could do the same as Streisand, but apparently she is a bigger pull. . . ."

Rudas said he now believes "$100 should have been the middle price" in a current structure that runs: $100, $175, $225, $385.

Above the $385 tickets, an additional 500 are being offered at $1,000 as a fundraiser for television station KTEH (Ch. 54). The PBS affiliate breaks down the $1,000 fee into $600 for the concert itself and $400 for the opportunity to attend a dinner afterward with the celebrity tenors.

As of Monday, 344 of the 500 benefit tickets had been sold, according to KTEH station manager Bill Matthews, who expects to sell 400 by the concert date. Matthews would like to make $100,000 from the benefit, after costs; he declined to estimate those costs.

Exposure exceeds 19 concerts

Since their debut during soccer's World Cup in Rome in 1990, the tenors have performed 19 times live -- and thousands of times more because of their PBS rebroadcasts.

They are accessible on their two bestseller CDs and three videos. They are beyond household-names familiar.

According to Matthews, the famous tenors are ubiquitous only "if you watch a lot of PBS. . . . This will be only their 20th live performance anywhere."

Tom Fanella, KTEH president, underlined: "They've performed live in the States four times. We're the fifth." The earlier shows were in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit.

Silicon Valley has encountered two-thirds of the famous trio, one at a time: Pavarotti has performed twice at the arena, in 1994 and 1997. His last Silicon Valley audience numbered more than 14,000 -- but this was 2,000 fewer fans than in 1994. In 1995, when Domingo appeared solo, his audience was 12,000. Last season Carreras was scheduled, but withdrew, for an arena concert; ticket sales for the November 1998 concert were quite low, Jirik confirmed, but he said the tenor "also had a scheduling conflict."

Rudas doesn't disagree that the popularity of his most successful trio might be on the wane. Yes, people might be tiring of an act that, critics scoff, doesn't often change its tunes.

"Maybe they have lost some shine; probably in certain places they have, but it's important to realize the Three Tenors were never meant to be a group like the Beatles."

Rudas thinks "other places are more interested in something like this. . . . Beijing, for instance, and then, we are planning for next year to do something in Las Vegas, where with one newspaper ad we sold more tickets for the event than this entire thing in San Jose!

"This year we have the Three Tenors in May in Washington, D.C., where the opera is working like crazy, and I can guarantee there will be corporate sponsorship, " Rudas said. There will also be Washington Opera artistic chief Plácido Domingo to get momentum rolling.

"Any time you get a corporate sponsor, too, there's a lot of enthusiasm, and this helps bring in bigger audiences, and more money for the arts groups," Rudas said. He rues the fact, as does Jirik, that the arena chief "went out and couldn't raise a penny" from corporate enthusiasts.

By contrast, when the Three Tenors played Tiger Stadium in May, generous funding from the Ford Motor Co. brought in $7 million for the troubled Michigan Opera Theater, which hooked onto the event as a fundraiser.

In Albany, N.Y., W. Donn Rogosin, president of public television station WMHT, said other stations would kill to have the tenors in their hometown. Thanks to KTEH's involvement with Pavarotti at San Jose Arena in previous seasons, "We've followed their benefit models, with success."

The prestige factor

In April, WMHT and the Albany Symphony were the recipients of modest gains when they hooked onto the tenors' concert at Pepsi Arena, which earned for the tenors $1.3 million.

"We did make money, in the tens of thousands, but it's the prestige factor that was so important," said Rogosin, who is now pursuing a similar benefit with tenor Andrea Bocelli.

At Connecticut Public Television, however, Mary Hobart, vice president for development, cautions pragmatism. The Three Tenors are still a force to be reckoned with, Hobart said, "but in a sense they have peaked. They've done the Baths of Caracalla; they've done the Eiffel Tower. What they need, let me be frank, is a new gimmick: They haven't sung with a fourth tenor yet. They need another angle."

Hobart said for a station benefit to make sense -- let alone sensible dollars -- there has to be a realistic price point. She thinks admission, particularly during the holiday season, and even for high-rolling Silicon Valley, should have started around the $35 to $40 range. For the public television benefit: `$1,000 for a pair of tickets," Hobart said, "that would work."

Copyright © 1999 Mercury Center.