TV MUSIC REVIEW : A Supertenor Circus at Roman Baths

Sweet little old ladies were selling their grandchildren in return for a single ticket. Cheerfully.

This, after all, was ballyhooed as the concert of the millennium. This was a musical event to end all musical events.

Actually, the description turned out to be just a bit misleading.

Event? Certainly. Musical? Well. . . .

We refer, of course, to the unprecedented meeting of three tenors one balmy night last July in the ruins of an ancient Roman bath house. Tenors? Make that supertenors.

Sportive competition was in the air. Anything you can sing, I can sing louder, or higher, or longer. . . .

Luciano Pavarotti, waving his trademark white tablecloth, had agreed to a little public celebration of the World Cup in company with a few friends: fellow tenorissimos Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras; a flashy and shameless, ever-accommodating maestro, Zubin Mehta; plus two--count ‘em, two--orchestras, one local and one from Florence.

The venue had to be the Terme di Caracalla. White horses, nomadic camels, sometimes even misplaced elephants, have been distracting attention from poor Aida and Radames on this vast stage every summer since 1938.

Bigger is bigger, get it? More is more.

The three pirates of the High Cs seemed to be in a jovial mood for their multizillion dollar reunion. They did a lot of mutual hugging, along with a lot of mutual mugging. Occasionally they pretended to be self-effacing. Mehta and his unwieldy bands followed the varied vocal whims with reasonable respect.

Meanwhile, a breathless world was watching every twitch and listening to every hemidemisemiquaver. As cameras ground away, some microphones recorded the historic orgy for a grateful posterity, and for a grateful commercial industry.

Other microphones apparently turned the potentially dulcet tones into monstrous echoes. But this was no time for churlish quibbling. Geniuses, after all, were at work. The P.R. machines told us so.

This week, the genial tenorial work will at last be available for televised sampling in the United States, courtesy of PBS. On Thursday at 7:30 p.m., KCET Channel 28 will present “Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti in Concert,” a 1 1/2-hour edition of the Rome program in a 2 1/2-hour time-slot padded with money-begging. A repeat of both music-making and pledge-breaking is scheduled Sunday night at 8. (KPBS Channel 15 airs the program Friday night at 9.)

The concert--long cherished as a prize-winning, best-selling CD--was a strange affair. The lofty heroes first took turns singing excerpts from their repertory of Greatest Operatic Hits. Then each ventured eine kleine Schlockmusik , the selections ranging from garbled Lehar to gargled “Granada,” with grandiose arias from “West Side Story” and “Cats” tossed in for bad measure.

Finally, the triumphant trio joined forces for gimmicky, sometimes funny collaborations that sounded improvised but obviously weren’t. “O, Sole Mio” went through the golden-voice wringer twice, the protagonists swapping soggy phrases quickly and crisply. At cadenza time, Pavarotti, his head shaking with furious nobility, gave his vainly imitating colleagues an object lesson in how to fake a trill.

The apex came, of course, with “Nessun dorma” from “Turandot,” virtually the World Cup theme song. The three disparate Calafs tossed Puccini’s expository lines back and forth like three Norns toying with the rope of fate. Ultimately, they conquered the final ascending phrase in fierce unison, sending everyone home in the advanced stage of climactic frenzy.

So who, you ask, won this bizarre singing contest?

No one won.

Carreras, looking a bit frail and nervous, emitted the most beautiful, most sensitive pianissimo sounds, but resorted to some alarming forcing in the knock-’em-dead sweepstakes. Domingo belted with easy grace and open-throated fervor, but encountered a little trouble on those rare occasions when introspection beckoned. Pavarotti, for all his narcissism, sang loud and soft, high and low, with equal, generalized panache.

If ever PBS had an opportunity to produce an interesting behind-the-scenes documentary, this would have been it. But the opportunity was wasted.

As compressed for American audiences, the program focuses doggedly on the three Meistersingers, the cameras concentrating on maximum laryngeal exposure. A promised interview feature with Beverly Sills acting as hostess has been dropped.

There is no voice-over narration. The titles of the arias--but not of the operas from which they come--are flashed briefly on the screen when each tenor appears. No background information is offered on the music, the singers or on the picturesque Caracalla surroundings. No one even mentions the reason for this strange convocation.

At least one glimpse of humanity does emerge, however, amid all the circus brouhaha. After a particularly arduous group stunt, a solicitous Pavarotti turns to an agitated Carreras. With fatherly spontaneity, the Italian idol uses his tablecloth to blot the brow of his younger rival.

It is a nice, reassuring touch.