Jose Carreras at the Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

Jose Carreras is a survivor, in more ways than one, with his well-publicised battle with leukaemia and that terrible moment, caught on video, when he was roundly abused by an irascible Leonard Bernstein during the 1985 recording of West Side Story.

The Spanish tenor didn't give us Maria at the Aotea Centre last night, although I suspect that most of the audience would have been in seventh heaven if he had. Indeed, many might have been more than happy for a few selections from his 1986 recording of South Pacific as well.

Bernstein, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, would have been high-class fare compared to most of the songs on the first half of Carreras' programme. A few weeks ago, Sydneysiders were treated to Alessandro Scarlatti as an opener, but we received a string of ballads by Costa, Tosti and Tirindelli. Pretty tame stuff this, although Carreras did manage to extract some unexpected passion out of the two Tirindelli songs.

These sweet, sentimental ditties have been staple repertoire for tenors from Benamino Gigli to Andrea Bocelli but, when one is fed them without respite, it's a little like replacing a tasty entree and a substantial first course with plate after plate of tiramisu.

After the interval, a collection of Spanish composers brought more vitality in the music and more energy from the singer. One could not but marvel at the sheer artistry of the man in a song like Ramirez's Alfonsina y el mar although, as with most numbers, it still suffered from a certain hardness of tone when the voice was pushed.

My favourite was probably the curiosity of the night - Un'ombra, a rather camp little number fashioned from Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto. It certainly had the virtues of giving Carreras' estimable pianist Lorenzo Bavaj the chance to have a few minutes of sub-Rachmaninov glory to himself. The large audience clamoured for encores and received four of them, ending with the inevitable Come Back to Sorrento, although there was not the weightier material one might have expected. A Nessun Dorma wouldn't have been amiss.

To end on a playful note, this is one encore that Carreras might have considered.

According to the programme, the tenor and Mercedes-Benz enjoy a "brand association". Perhaps someone should tell him that there is this song by Janis Joplin ...