JUST how do you define the elusive quality of a great opera voice?

Whatever it is, Jose Carreras has it - and in spades. Dark, sensuous, charismatic, and full of passion, Carreras’ Spanish tenor tones have taken him around the world.

The 54-year-old has held audiences in the palm of his hand in some of Europe’s finest opera houses and captivated hundreds of thousands at a time performing with the Three Tenors in giant American sports stadiums.

As a child he sang to steamship passengers returning to Spain from Argentina and to customers in his mother’s tiny hairdresser’s shop in Barcelona.

And tomorrow night Carreras performs in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall for the second time.

When Carreras last visited Edinburgh, during the 1982 Edin-burgh Festival, he was already established in the upper ranks of the world’s opera superstars.

On the bill at the Usher Hall that night was an epic recital of Verdi’s Requiem, featuring the talents of the London Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh’s Festival Chorus along with Carreras, tenor Ruggero Raimondi and sopranos Jessye Norman and Margaret Price. It was an ensemble of "awesome potency," according to one critic.

Now the covers are finally off the new-look Usher Hall and Carreras is back in Edinburgh to christen the £9 million facelift.

Final details of tomorrow night’s bill - also featuring rising Scottish Opera soprano Lisa Milne along with the City of Glasgow Chorus and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - are expected to be finalised only hours before the audience start to take their seats.

Of that audience, some will be there to see if Carreras’ voice still retains most of the full, sweet, complexity which saw him rise to stardom in the Seventies and Eighties. Some will be there to see "the other one" from the Three Tenors - the quiet, undemonstrative singer sandwiched between the over-the-top, hankie-waving histrionics of Luciano Pavarotti and the stagey sincerity of Placido Domingo.

And all will be there to help raise money - an estimated £300,000 - to leukaemia research and to pay tribute to a man who was nearly broken by the killer disease.

In 1987 the Catalan tenor was warned that he had only a one in ten chance of surviving the onslaught of acute leukaemia.

Survive he did, though only thanks to a bone marrow transplant and an arduous regime of chemotherapy which lasted nearly two years.

On his recovery Carreras set up his own foundation to help fund research into the disease.

"In my personal life I had an experience where I suffered for a long period, and was lucky enough to overcome the situation," he mused later.

"Of course, afterwards I thought that I had to help the people who are going through the same situation, given all the generosity I received during this difficult period in my life."

Conceived as an opportunity for Pavarotti and Domingo to welcome their "little brother" back to the big stage, the Three Tenors made their debut in front of a billion-strong worldwide TV audience as part of the build-up to the World Cup final in Rome in 1990.

Nowadays, Tenors’ appearances and recitals take up most of Carreras’ time. As far as opera goes, he restricts himself to a handful of appearances a year, usually in the title role in Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s little-known tragedy Sly.

Even in the face of accusations that he has contributed to the "dumbing down" of opera, the quiet Spaniard rejects the prima donna posturing of some of his colleagues.

"I respect the opinion of the purists," he points out. "I have no problem admitting that what we do falls somewhere between opera and entertainment. Opera began as entertainment and every artist is a performer, an entertainer."

And he says he remains committed to discovering the emotional truth behind each piece he performs.

"I always believe that what really produces the sound, what produces everything are your own emotions and feelings.

"All of these feelings go through the instrument that is your voice. They go to the brain, and the brain somehow guides these feelings and produces the voice."

It sounds easier than it really is.

l Jose Carreras, Usher Hall,
tomorrow, SOLD OUT
Thursday, 7th December 2000

Copyright © 2000 The Edinburgh Evening News Online.