José Carreras recital

I almost missed out on a great opportunity to listen to Carreras because by the time I learned about the recital earlier this week, it was already sold out. If I hadn't exhausted all my contacts and traded some favors, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to catch one of the finest living opera singers in my lifetime.

The concert: while Carreras has lost some of his range (the highest note he hit all night, if my pitch hasn't failed me, was a Ab5 --and that was delivered with visible strain), he more than made up with an impassioned, controlled delivery. His intense concentration was amply projected through his voice and, to an even greater extent, his facial emotions. Notwithstanding a few strained high notes, Carreras' voice oozed with a mature, dutiful yet non-threatening perfection. The dramatic highlight of the evening was a superbly crafted encore piece --Verdi's Libiamo ne' lieti calici, together with soprano Po-ching Ip (no, I don't believe Carreras hit the last Bb...but who cares...the capacity audience, including I, went absolutely berserk after a prolonged, rousing third-last note, the G5). In an earlier encore (he did a total of three encores), Carreras first confounded the audience by revealing what seemed to be a hastily scribbled cheat sheet, and then turned the house into a pandemonium when he began singing to the tune of "在那遙遠的地方", in accented (but arguably well spelled-out?) Mandarin Chinese. While Carreras was taking breaks on backstage between his 10 arias of the evening, Ip (who was a classmate of mine at music school in HK, over 10 years ago) filled in with memorable performances, including Puccini's O mio babbino caro and, as an encore, Gounod's Je veux vivre dans ce reve.

To end, a little about the performance venue: it was held at the white-themed Concert Hall at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (or The Egg, as it is affectionately known). Similar to the opera house (which I visited two weeks ago when it first opened), the concert hall's interior is subtly tasteful and, thank goodness, without the kind of excessive exuberance that seems to define the modern Chinese taste. My only complaint: the existence of pieces of glass-like material separating the grid lights from the ambiance. When these grid lights hit the side of this glass-like material, a magnified refraction is casted on the side of the concert hall. Because the grid is suspended through wires from the ceiling, it could move, if ever so slightly, enough to cause the magnified refraction to move, in a musically miscued and visually annoying manner.