COVER STORY : Not as Easy as 1-2-3 : Bringing Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti back together was tough and expensive. But when you consider the rewards, it might just be worth it--for the Three Tenors and their fans

Imagine Dodger Stadium on a warm July night, packed with people, magic in the air.

Now send the baseball players home, build a stage in center field flanked by trees, waterfalls and classic columns, and plop three world-class singing cash machines onstage.

What do you have? “Encore! The Three Tenors,” a concert-cum-potential-gold-mine set for Saturday, the evening before the World Cup championship soccer match. Tenors Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti join conductor Zubin Mehta for a Southern California reprise of their precedent-setting 1990 concert in Rome.

At a cost that “Tenors” impresario Tibor Rudas claims is “a lot more” than $10 million, little will be spared to turn Dodger Stadium into a classic amphitheater where, promoters swear, sound will rival a concert hall. Not only are concert tickets at stake, some still available at prices as high as $1,000, but so are mega-dollar record, TV and video plans.

Nobody at the Rudas Organization will discuss income, but reliable sources estimate the concert alone would gross $12.5 million to $15 million should it sell out. And Rudas says he’s signed 274 contract pages on this project--more than on all the other events of his 50-year career combined.

Rudas and his network of big-scale-event mavens have been planning this concert for the past two years. Decisions have ranged from just what should go into a three tenor sandwich plate (salmon, chicken and eggplant) to how to assure aircraft will “fly neighborly” over Dodger Stadium next Saturday night. Not to mention what the tenors will sing.

More than 40,000 seats in the stands, priced at $15 to $150, sold out months ago through Dodger Stadium’s ticket office and phone sales, say promoters of the event. Another 13,000 more expensive seats placed on the playing field will be on four different levels to assure better sight lines.

The concert will be 2 1/2 hours long, with two acts’ worth of familiar arias and show tunes of the sort each tenor has performed in individual large-scale concerts. Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti--one by one and together--will be accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Music Center Opera Chorus.

Last month, the tenors sang together for the first time since Rome in 1990, performing for charity in Monte Carlo for Prince Rainer, Princess Caroline and invited guests. Among those expected in Los Angeles’ celebrity-studded audience, say promoters, will be former Presidents Bush and Reagan and their wives.

“Encore!” will be the first joint appearance by the celebrated singers and Mehta in the United States. Given the financial success of the 1990 concert’s assorted spin-offs, promoters are missing few opportunities to emulate its lucrative afterlife.

Taped broadcasts of the 1990 concert have been public television’s top fund-raisers, for instance. KCET Channel 28 alone has aired the show 21 times since it first aired in March, 1991, and every time has included pledge breaks.

Although Saturday night’s concert will air live elsewhere, it will be blacked out in Los Angeles and Orange County. It will air on KCET on Sunday at 4 and 7 p.m. and KOCE Channel 50 at 5 and 8 p.m. and, no doubt, many more times after that.

PBS, of course, is just the start. Satellites will deliver the show to more than 100 countries, nearly all of which will air the concert live or within 24 hours. Records and videos could be in stores as early as Aug. 30.

Expectations are running high, of course: London Records advertises that the 1990 “Three Tenors” concert album was “the world’s No. 1 classical bestseller” at more than 10 million records and videos worldwide. Officials at Warner Music Group, which acquired worldwide TV, radio, record and home video rights for the 1994 concert, say they hope to do even better.

Warner’s Atlantic Records will release “The Three Tenors in Concert: 1994” in the United States, and its Teldec Classics International will handle international release. Warner affiliates will assemble a home video of the concert and, later, a “making of” video. Already out on newsstands around the world, in five languages, is an official $10 pre-concert program from San Francisco-based Collins Publishers.

Noting the vastness of their repertoire, including opera, crossovers and Neapolitan songs, Carreras is quoted in the program as saying the tenors had “a lot of ideas” about selections. “Believe me,” Carreras says, “the repertoire has always been the easiest part of planning this concert.”

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The three tenor phenomenon got its start back in June, 1989, during a post-concert dinner one night just outside Rome.

Carreras and his manager, Mario Dradi, got to talking: If Dradi was such a good promoter, asked Carreras, would Dradi be able to set up and pull off a concert starring Carreras, Pavarotti and Domingo?

Dradi got on it the next day, he recalled in a phone conversation from his office in Bologna, Italy. Domingo and Pavarotti were amenable, and so was conductor Zubin Mehta. Discussions proceeded, and the principals agreed on a charity concert at the Baths of Caracalla, a 3rd-Century ruin outside Rome, in July, 1990.

Agreements called for tickets to be sold at branches of an Italian bank, and two months before the concert, the box office opened. Thousands of people were waiting at branches all over Italy and other European countries, says Dradi, when tickets went on sale one morning at 9.

Three minutes later, he says, the event sold out. Nearly 100,000 people reportedly competed for the 6,500 or so tickets priced at $20 to $300.

“At that time, they were considered to be three rivals,” recalls Lisa Altman, then director of promotion and product for London Records and now vice president of Phillips Classics Records. “People have probably forgotten by now--it seems so natural that they would appear together--but when I was on the front line pitching the story, I recall a great curiosity as to whether it would happen.”

London/Decca took a huge risk on the tenors record, concedes Lynne Hoffman-Engel, now senior vice president of marketing and sales for PolyGram Classics and Jazz. “But I think there were plenty of believers around. There was just so much curiosity to see what happens when the three got together on the stage for the first time.”

Decca released its recording in September, 1990. Then came public television replays in March, 1991, with close-ups of Domingo and Carreras exchanging high fives, and Pavarotti whipping out his white handkerchief to wipe Carreras’ brow. Record sales accelerated.

The 1990 “Three Tenors” record is still selling, and the show is still in PBS reruns. KCET, for instance, raised $612,000 in pledges during the three times it first aired the show during a 1991 pledge drive and just aired the show again in late June. The station plans to air the 1994 concert next Sunday--twice.

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Neither the tenors nor Mehta took home any money from the 1990 concert, say both Mehta and Dradi. For the recording they were reportedly paid a flat fee by Decca Records--said by Billboard magazine to be $500,000 each. So given the vast sums made by others in 1990, it is likely the tenors and Mehta asked for a fair amount of money this time out.

Rudas is not discussing what his stars are earning. He laughs out loud at a rumored $3.5 million apiece for the tenors. “It’s not true,” he claims, without giving any other figure. “They’re getting exactly the same money they got in Rome--already a fortune.”

Rudas has been pushing them to do a second concert since he rushed backstage after the first one. At first the tenors resisted, says the Hungarian impresario, but they changed their minds once the World Cup was set for the United States and Los Angeles.

The three superstars are all soccer fans; a young Pavarotti even received his first fame as a soccer player in his hometown of Modena, Italy. All have spoken of the joy of performing together in Rome. And the 1994 concert would be, well, money in the bank.

Rudas, the man who sent Pavarotti singing to the masses in such places as New York’s Central Park and London’s Hyde Park, says he started making plans the day after the 1990 concert. “No matter how good friends the tenors are, the audience feels one wants to be better than the other. You wouldn’t have an ego if you didn’t want to do your best. The audience feels the same way--this is the best they sing, either individually or together.”

Producing this concert as a World Cup event, Rudas started assembling his staff even before he’d signed up his tenors. Most, like his general manager Wayne Baruch, were veterans of Olympics ceremonies, New York’s Statue of Liberty celebration or other enormous outdoor events.

By early 1993 came what Baruch calls “a dizzying round of negotiations (and) shuttle diplomacy.” Rudas flew off to meet with Pavarotti in Japan, then went on to visit the others in Oslo, Vienna and London. Mehta, for instance, says he was originally tied up that night but the Munich Opera gave him some time off so he could spend a few days in Los Angeles.

Once the tenors were set, the Rudas Organization had to choose its Los Angeles site. Baruch says he looked “at every venue you could think of” and even considered building a venue for 30,000 people in either the Sepulveda Basin or Santa Monica. The problem, he says, wasn’t in building a facility but finding a location that worked in terms of appearance, acoustics, access and parking.

Then the promoters came upon Dodger Stadium. It can seat upward of 50,000 people, and many of the tickets could be sold at what Baruch calls “popular prices.” The stadium was available, and its management was interested.

“Encore! The Three Tenors” will be the first classical event at Dodger Stadium, but pop groups from the Beatles to the Cure have performed there over the years. Baruch even worked there twice before--staging Pope John Paul II’s 1987 Mass and the 1991 opening ceremonies of the U.S. Olympic Festival.

“With the Pope,” says Baruch, “we had only 13 hours to do it. But the complexity here far outstrips anything that’s ever been done at Dodger Stadium or to my knowledge any facility of this size or nature. We’re going to transform the stadium into a beautiful concert amphitheater with an exquisite and accurate sound system.”

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One day last August, sound designer Alexander Yuill-Thornton II left his San Rafael-based office and headed south. Yuill-Thornton, who designed the sound for the 1990 tenors concert, went to take a look at Dodger Stadium.

Yuill-Thornton wanted to get a feel of the place empty. So, for a few hours, he and his colleagues climbed up and down the stands, walked the field, stood where the stage would be. He held meetings and took notes, then left with blueprints of the stadium.

He was back in October for a Dodgers game. He listened to the stadium’s public address system “so I could hear how the place sounded and survey it for sound reflections. I walked every inch of the seating areas listening for noise sources that could disturb our concert.”

Other work was done back at his office, Yuill-Thornton says. Blueprints gave him the data he needed for his computer and state-of-the-art equipment. And he knew what he needed to discuss with stadium officials regarding noise abatement.

Dodger Stadium is hardly the Baths of Caracalla, which have also served the Rome Opera on summer performances. But, says Yuill-Thornton, Dodger Stadium is “reasonably isolated. Once we get everybody in, it should be reasonably quiet.”

Oval football fields don’t work for concerts because sound reverberates, says Rudas. But, he adds, Dodger Stadium is ideal because the area behind the stage can be open and sound can escape naturally.

Plans call for the stage to be set up in center field so performers will face home plate. A veritable forest will be added behind and at both sides of the stage, designed to hide the pavilion, or outfield bleachers--but not the San Gabriel Mountains.

Baruch calls all such preparation “the frame for a Rembrandt.” That’s not just for the people on hand, but also for the more than 1 billion people worldwide Rudas predicts will watch it on TV.

“It’s a baseball park, and how do you obscure the outfield seating?” asks art director Rene Lagler, an Emmy Award-winning designer. “To do it with three-dimensional greens takes forever and costs an arm and leg. So you do what we do best in Hollywood--you create illusions.”

Lagler will combine several hundred trees, shrubs, flowers and rocks with nearly 500 feet of backdrop paintings of terrain. There will also be fake-rock waterfalls, each 48 feet high, on either side of the stage.

Somebody asked Pavarotti about singing with a waterfall nearby, reports Baruch. “Pavarotti said, ‘Don’t worry, it will be quiet water.’ ” (The waterfalls will be turned off during the concert.)

Twenty classical columns, each 40 feet high, were designed by Laszlo Szekely and the components built in Hungary. Shipped here last year, they were taken to San Bernardino, where a scaffolding company assembled the basic structure as well as overhead trusses for stage roofing and lighting.

Little has been left to chance on this project. The set was constructed for testing--and for a coming “making of” documentary--about six months ago. It was assembled in a giant hangar at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, says designer Lagler, then tested and put into storage until the concert.

One problem was how to light the stage so as not to block anybody’s view. The solution, says lighting designer Olin Younger, included using two towers at the foul-ball posts at the stadium that do not block any sight lines. Follow lights for the tenors and Mehta will be set up in existing camera positions on the first and third base lines, Younger says, rather than dead center as is usually the case at most concerts.

“We want lighting to enhance but not detract from the performance,” says Younger. “The approach is different than on rock ‘n’ roll here. It’s an operatic concert and needs to be treated with the care that evokes.”

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As in 1990, the singers will appear and are billed in alphabetical order. The 1994 program includes arias from such operas as Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” (Carreras) and Verdi’s “Macbeth” (Domingo), as well as such Broadway tunes as Rodgers and Hart’s “With a Song in My Heart” (Carreras) and Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion’s “The Impossible Dream” (Domingo). Pavarotti will sing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” as well as what should be the only reprise of 1990--”Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”

There will also be two medleys, one a tribute to Hollywood, the other a selection of international melodies. Both are being arranged by Lalo Schifrin, who performed the same duties in 1990 with such Broadway tunes as “Maria/Tonight” from “West Side Story” and “Memory” from “Cats,” not to mention the folk song “Cielito Lindo,” and “La Vie en Rose.”

Earlier plans had called for an intermission tribute to Gene Kelly, re-creating his dance to Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” but its setup apparently created problems with wiring and cabling. Kelly is expected to attend the concert, says Rudas, who disclosed that in a tribute to the dancer-choreographer, the first act’s medley will close with the song “Singin’ in the Rain.”

“When each one does his aria, it is all very serious,” says Mehta, reached by phone in Munich. “But when these three guys get onstage together, that’s when the sparks fly.”

To get the promotional ball rolling, Mehta and the tenors participated in a press conference in April at New York’s glamorous Rainbow Room. The well-attended event provided a photographic opportunity so rich that one TV reporter compared press coverage to that for a Beatles reunion.

The three tenors and Mehta also performed June 9 at the Centre de Congres in Monte Carlo for 1,000 invited guests. The charity concert for Prince Rainer and Princess Caroline afforded the three a chance to sing together for the first time since 1990, to work before a smaller audience and, certainly not least, to record a music video clip that could be used by Warner Music for such things as TV ads.

Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun says he went to the rehearsal in Monte Carlo planning a quick visit before the actual concert but “I couldn’t leave my seat. There’s a slight spirit of mock competition, but underlying it is a great respect for each other’s talent.”

Ertegun and Mehta each cite the same “high point” at the Monte Carlo event. At one point during the encores, says Ertegun, “Placido looked at Zubin, and Zubin gave him his conductor’s baton. Placido got up and conducted the orchestra and Zubin got down and sang with the other two tenors. The audience went crazy.”

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While both sides decline comment on what Warner Music Group paid Rudas for recording, TV and home video rights, reliable sources indicate it is more than $11 million.

Rudas says he talked with four different record companies, including Decca, the classical record company that did the 1990 concert. Warner Music Group “matched the best offer,” says Rudas, and offered him the chance to work with record mogul Ertegun, co-chairman of the Atlantic Group and a prime advocate for holding the World Cup in the United States.

The deal also worked well for both sides. The 1990 record sold about 2 million copies in the United States, and the remainder were sold elsewhere. Ertegun says his company, which covers the pop spectrum, stressed its clout in the U.S. market.

Last September, Ertegun and Atlantic Group vice chairman Mel Lewinter went to Pebble Beach to meet with Rudas. After three days working out the main points of the agreement, says Ertegun, they turned things over to their lawyers.

The deal took months. Pavarotti had an exclusive contract with Decca and Carreras with Warner Music, for one thing. But sources close to the negotiation say too much was at stake for anyone to pass up a deal.

There were concessions. It is understood, for instance, that Decca has the right to put together a second album from whatever isn’t used in Warner’s various compilations from the concert. If Decca decides to do so, its record could only be released more than a year after the release of Warner’s recording and video.

Given the complexity of the deal, Atlantic executives started putting together marketing while lawyers were still hammering out details, says Val Azzoli, executive vice president and general manager of Atlantic Records. Azzoli and other top Warner executives formed an international steering committee that circled the globe in meetings in recent months.

“Every day there’s something to do with the three tenors,” says Azzoli. “It’s a high-maintenance operation. (But) how many records do you work on that have this worldwide appeal?”

Azzoli sets the advertising budget at “over a million dollars,” just in the United States. It covers everything from TV, newspapers and magazines to billboards, bus stops and commuter train stops in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. There may be no recording yet, but “we have never been more prepared,” Azzoli says.

A video will be released at the same time as the record--probably at the end of August. One camera crew, with 10 cameras, will be shooting for PBS as well as for Warner’s A*Vision, says A*Vision president Stuart Hirsch. There were reportedly 1.5 million videos sold of the 1990 concert, one-third to U.S. buyers, and Hirsch says he’s hoping to exceed those U.S. sales this time out.

Hence the big push. “Teen-agers buy records as a way of life,” says Azzoli. “But the people we’re appealing to have mortgages, cars, children. Music isn’t as important to them, and it’s more expensive to reach them because we can’t get them on the radio. If a person buys two records a year, we want one of them to be the tenors record.”

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Rudas isn’t talking about how much money the concert is costing, aside from saying that insurance alone comes to “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Asked if costs will top the reported $10 million for the 1990 concert, he responds, “it will cost a lot more than $10 million. I can’t give you figures but it costs millions, millions. It’s incredible.”

But selling out is no sure thing. “There’s a big demand for tickets, but at the low end,” says ticket broker Fred Ross, partner in Front Row Center Ticket Service.

“J.Q. Public doesn’t want to spend that much money for this event,” says Ross. “The demand for recent Eagles reunion tickets--for a concert that wasn’t even in L.A.--was much greater, and people were willing to spend considerably more money despite the uniqueness of this event. I suspect that just as World Cup organizers felt there would be a greater demand for tickets than there has been, they over-gauged demand for tickets to this particular event.”

Ross says his company is buying only to fill orders. “We don’t intend to carry a big stock on this event,” he says. “On the other hand, for Garth Brooks (at the Hollywood Bowl Thursday), we bought everything we could get our hands on.”

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The big push to set up starts today after the Dodgers’ afternoon game. The game is set to begin at 1:05 p.m. and finish around 4 p.m., after which the Dodgers go on the road.

“We’re praying they don’t go into extra innings,” says Baruch. “The minute they leave the field, we will occupy the stadium and work around the clock the next six days.”

Lighting designer Younger, for instance, expects to have a crew in at 6 p.m. to start pre-cabling. Scaffolding people will start putting in bleachers for greenery, and construction of the stage will start. Once the stage is built, they’ll install the sound system and get ready for rehearsals.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Music Center Opera Chorus rehearse on their own this week before dress rehearsals Thursday and Friday evenings at Dodger Stadium. The tenors themselves are not even set to arrive until the middle of next week.

Meanwhile, say promoters, newsstands worldwide are selling the initial run of 300,000 concert programs, printed on three continents. The 70-page magazine-size program, priced at $10 in the United States, includes biographies and photographs of the tenors and Mehta as well as texts (with translations) of arias and other songs.

A deluxe hardcover edition, also from San Francisco-based Collins Publishers, a division of Harper Collins, is set for on-air sales. And come fall, expect the “souvenir gift edition”--a coffee-table-style book along the lines of Harper Collins’ “Day in the Life” series. It will add new editorial material to photographs taken before, during and after the concert.

Photographers for that book--which may even later be packaged with the record and video as a Christmas offering--have already started descending on Dodger Stadium. They’ll all be jostling for position with the scores of news photographers, documentary makers and TV crews expected to immortalize the goings-on.

Then, of course, there’s the record, and the clock is ticking. Even as the tenors walk off the stage, says Atlantic Records executive Azzoli, “we’re taking the tapes, racing to the studio and starting the mix. We’ll probably have two or three studios (in Los Angeles) going at the same time.”

Later will come editing the music. The concert will last at least two hours, and Azzoli says they can only put 76 minutes on the CD.

Then, of course, comes the worrying. “Like any sequel, it’s much harder because there are expectations,” Azzoli concedes.

“With the first one, nobody knew what they had and magic just happened. Four guys got together in Rome and you hit a nerve. We’re trying to re-create that magic and hit that same nerve.”*

* “Encore! The Three Tenors,” Dodger Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave.; Saturday, gates open at 5 p.m., show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets available at press time: $300-$1,000.