Once upon a time, there were three tenors named Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.

Domingo was the versatile workhorse of the trio, singing everywhere and everything, and doing so with robust, heroic, clarion tone and uncommon musicality. When he wasn't doing opera and concerts, he was running opera companies and conducting. He was indefatigable, a miraculous phenomenon in the history of singing. He still is.

Pavarotti was the popular hero, blessed with an open, sensual, lyric voice, instantly recognizable. For all his girth, he exuded an endearing stage appeal. Not content to rest on these considerable laurels, however, during the 1980s he allowed his publicity handlers to transform him into "the greatest tenor who ever lived." Fired by Lyric Opera for his frequent no-shows, he went on to cheapen his gifts in horridly amplified stadium gigs that pretended to bring culture to the masses, albeit at premium prices the masses couldn't afford.

Although he wasn't so much a household word nor blessed with as big a voice, Carreras sang with uncommon sweetness, ardor and refinement before a bout with leukemia in the 1980s forced him into a long if career-prolonging retirement.

In 1990, on the eve of the World Cup finals, Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras first sang together in a concert at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome that later became the best-selling classical recording of all time. The occasion carried a nice feeling of unscripted fun and good-natured one-upmanship. From that event, since repeated in 25 other live concerts throughout the world, the phenomenon known as The Three Tenors was born.

Sunday evening, Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti presented their first joint concert in Chicago at the United Center, the windup of a 10th-anniversary tour that has taken them this year to Las Vegas, Washington, Cleveland and São Paulo, Brazil. With tickets priced from $50 to $600, the promoter, Tibor Rudas, sold about 15,500 of the 17,000 seats. There's milk in the old cash cow yet.

But not much else, I'm afraid. Ten years later, most of the fun has gone out of the Three Tenors franchise. Early on, they sang these stadium extravaganzas ostensibly to make new friends for opera. Now, nobody can pretend they are doing them for anything but the money—big, obscene buckets of money.

The Three Tenors' concerts have long since become boilerplate gigs for the rich and fatuous, scripted down to the last medley-encore. Booming amplification makes their voices hover over the orchestra like surreal, singing whales; they could just as well be up there lip-synching to their recordings, and, one suspects, the fans would be just as happy.

It's not simply that the boys are by now rather long in the tooth to still be traipsing around the stadium circuit. (Pavarotti admits to being 65, Domingo 59, Carreras 54.) It's that they all give the distinct impression they're bored, that they'd much rather be somewhere else, doing something better with their time. Interaction on stage is minimal. They just stand there with smiles on their faces and arms raised and Pavarotti flapping his oversized hanky at the flashbulb-popping fans.

The tenors sang about as well as you would expect from singers their ages. They belted out their romantic songs and arias, two hokey medleys and lots of sugarcoated pops with Pavlovian professionalism. An orchestra consisting of Chicago Symphony players and local freelancers furnished the symphonic window-dressing under conductor Janos Acs, who obviously hails from the slam-bang, let's-get-it-over-quick school of accompanying.

Of the three, Domingo sounded the best and sang with the most style, feeling and musical intelligence. He alone had wit enough to kid the concept, substituting "three tenors" for "two drifters" in a verse of "Moon River." Carreras, whose voice never fully recovered after his illness, huffed and puffed in a strenuous "can belto" style that seemed at times to be parodying his former self.

As for Pavarotti, who pioneered the idea of tenoral stadium spectaculars, the voice is still in amazingly good shape, a testament to remarkable preservation at the end of a long career. But, despite two marvelously sung Puccini arias (including his signature "Nessun dorma"), everything he delivered tended to sound the same, unconnected to word meanings or emotions. His English diction in the American medley was a hoot. Perhaps it's time for him to graciously pack it in, or go back to doing solo gigs where he doesn't have to share the marbles.

Copyright © 2000 Chicago Tribune.