José Carreras/Bryn Terfel
Albert Hall, London SW7

SCARLET roses, scarlet lighting and plenty of scarlet women: it was over-the-top night at the Albert Hall, make no mistake. And, as it seemed to have been decided that neither José Carreras, Bryn Terfel, nor the BBC Concert Orchestra could be heard without amplification, the decibels, too, were larger than life.

It really does have to be said yet again: amplification with standing mikes and huge speakers does absolutely nothing for a classical symphony orchestra except to make it sound like a worn-out vinyl LP. The subtle and distinctive contours of a voice such as that of Carreras, too, tend to be flattened by such unsubtle sound design, while to turn up the volume on Terfel's bass-baritone is just absurd.

But if this capacity audience was denied the opportunity to wonder at the projection of the natural voice and the variegated textures of an orchestra, it was refused little else. There was Adeste Fideles and White Christmas; there was Welsh and there was Catalan. There was Wagner and zarzuela; there was Broadway and Granada.

No sooner had Carreras, with that irresistible quiver of fragility within his still ardent tenor, ceased hymning the Blessed Virgin in Pregaria by Fermin Maria Alvarez, than Terfel, now suffused in a magenta glow, began singing with no less pathos the praises of My Little Welsh Home. Carreras replied to Terfel's Ar Hyd y Nos with José Serrano's Cancion hungara, only to provoke Terfel into a fierce Toreador Song, brilliantly reinvented with a tense frisson of fear coiled in every springing rhythm.

Having shed the rolls of fat so grotesquely imposed upon him as Falstaff at Covent Garden only the night before, Terfel was lithe, nonchalant, "restless as a willow in a windstorm" for Rodgers and Hammerstein's It Might As Well Be Spring. The muscle of the Little Drummer Boy was toned, too, by being sung in Spanish by Carreras who went on, under a soft blue light, to sing sweetly of La Virgen lava panales, a folksy carol which seemed to be about Mary washing nappies while her offspring went fishing.

After Terfel had briefly visited Camelot with How to Handle a Woman and Carreras had raised shrieks of ecstasy with Cardillo's Core 'ngrato, you might wonder what could possibly have been served up as an encore. As it was, conductor David Giminez succeeded in keeping his players on stage for no fewer than ten of them. And with Terfel offering searching performances of Wagner, Handel and Mozart in between Carreras's unending stream of canzone d'amor, the White Christmas they wished for on behalf of their audience turned out to have many a substantial musical gift on offer as well as all its handsome and generous wrapping.

Copyright © 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd.