I can remember the very first time I heard what seemed to me to be the voice of god. I was listening to a Classic FM station at home in Sydney and the announcer played a track from a 1976 recording of ‘Tosca’. It was conducted by Sir Colin Davis – the track was ‘E lucevan le stelle’ and the singer was Jose Carreras. I don’t know if it is possible to fall in love through a song but I fell pretty darn hard!

I was hooked. That was just prior to the famous 1990 World Cup concert at Caracalla in Rome by The Three Tenors so by the time I sat down to watch the video soon after (the concert was not shown live at the time in Australia) I had become something of a Carreras nut. Sure he was a little greyer and a few years older than on the cover of that 1976 recording of Tosca but to me he was still pretty darn hot for an opera singer. The Three Tenors made opera ‘cool’ as it so deserved to be and placed opera right up there with U2, Madonna and every other major rock and pop star at that time. Who would have thought that three men over 50 and wearing tuxedos could have gone right to the top of the charts ?

Jose was my favourite – everyone had their own particular tenor they preferred – and I built up a sizeable collection of his operas and recordings, concerts on video (remember those) and lapped up anything I could find out about him. If there was such a thing as an ‘opera groupie’ then I easily could have become one…

In 1991 my prayers were answered when he came out to Australia and I took Mum and her sister along to see him perform at the Sydney Entertainment Centre – we were like excited teenagers – we saw him again in 1994 when he returned. Opera buffs and self-proclaimed experts the world over often argued over who of the ‘Big Three’ was the better singer and it was an argument which really had no answer; Domingo, Pavarotti and Jose each had their own unique qualities. No doubt Jose’s voice has a ‘before the illness and after the illness’ aspect but even still the quality and passion that define his voice was never affected.

I love to listen to that ‘76 Tosca – it is my favourite opera recording and I defy anyone to listen to the voice of that handsome young Catalan man singing in his prime and not feel shivers down their spine. The other night Jose was honoured at the Classical Brit Awards with a Lifetime Achievment Award, as he is about to retire from the world of opera performance (not from singing though) it could not have come at a more appropriate time. He helped take an art form that at one stage was the domain of the rich and cultivated, the fur coated ladies and champagne-toting men and placed it back within reach of the ordinary people, young and old.  Back where it began and back where it definitely belongs.