Saturday night at the Bastille Opera in Paris, and it's show time. Inside the concrete foyer the middle classes mill about, programmes in hand; outside, Japanese tourists wearing optimistic smiles and hand-written "Cherche Billets" signs brave the sharp air of late January. They won't find any tickets: for the well-to-do French yuppie, opera represents maximum chic, and the place is packed to the doors. For a visiting Paddy, the excitement is palpable - on the opera thermometer, a new production of Carmen at one of Europe's major opera houses has to rate somewhere between "overheated" and "feverish".
The moment the curtain rises, however, it becomes apparent that this production is never going to make it into the annals of theatre history. We peer in dismay as interminable chorus lines dressed in 40 shades of brown repeatedly skip back and forth across a dimly-lit stage. We fidget discreetly to keep ourselves awake, and are just beginning to long for a few mantillas and a red flounce or two when, mid-way through the second act, a miracle occurs. Carmen's lover Don Jose, sung by the Argentinian tenor Jose Cura, has taken centre stage to sing La Fleur Que Tu M'avais Jetee - which, thanks to the seamless beauty of its melody and its extraordinary pianissimo finish, has become a showpiece aria. The moment he begins to sing, a profound silence settles on the audience. All fidgeting ceases. By the time he reaches that final, anguished "je t'aime", Carmen's is probably the only dry eye in the house. It's a miracle, all right - the miracle of a top-class tenor in action.
A beautiful, effortlessly powerful voice; a lithe, panther-like grace on stage; a commitment to the part so total that when we go backstage to congratulate him on his performance, Cura - though he is, as always, the epitome of hospitality and charm - appears drained to the point of exhaustion. This is what it's like at the top of the opera ladder. The rewards are great: so are the pitfalls. For every tenor who makes it to the top rung, dozens get stuck on the lower reaches, or fall off altogether.
But has Cura made it to the very top? And if so, is he alone there, or is there a plethora of pretenders to the tenor crown? Over the next few years, will we see the emergence of "a new three tenors" to replace the unholy trinity of Domingo, Carreras and Pavarotti, mostly retired from active service after long and stunningly successful careers - or is the whole idea just an outdated marketing notion which will be quietly allowed to drop by a new generation of intelligent, clued-in singers? Neil Dalrymple, an agent with the London-based Music International, has no hesitation in placing Jose Cura in the first rank of today's tenors, along with the Sicilian-born Roberto Alagna and new boy on the block Marcelo Alvarez. Below those three, he says, there's a major jump downwards to the next level, where he picks out the Americans Jerry Hadley and Richard Leech, a Canadian helden-tenor by the name of Richard Margison, and the Hispanic bel canto trio of Ramon Vargas, Luis Lima and Tito Beltran. If you're after a hot tip, he suggests giving a listen to a young black American tenor working out of Stuttgart, Kenneth Tarver - "he's coming to Covent Garden next year, and people say he's going to move up very quickly". One of the most notable aspects of the contemporary tenor scene, says Dalrymple, is the relative paucity of Italian names on the cast lists.
"I went to a production of La Gioconda at La Scala a couple of years ago," he says. "There was a double cast, which means 12 principal singers altogether, and of those, only three were Italians. And this is supposed to be the home of Italian opera . . .
"At the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, Italian tenors are even thinner on the ground. "What we have here is a house system," explains artistic director Elaine Padmore, who, during her spell as artistic director at Wexford Festival Opera, had a reputation for spotting and encouraging new talent. "We grow our own - or try to, but tenors of the Italian type don't really grow very well in Scandinavia. You get more of the helden-tenors, the ones who sing Wagner, and you certainly wouldn't want to hear them sing Nessun Dorma - it's a completely different sound." So she hires in guest tenors at the rate of six or seven a season. "A lot of the new talent actually is coming out of eastern Europe. There are some terrific voices coming out of Russia - there's an amazing guy from Georgia called Shalva Mukeria who's going to be doing La traviata with us.
The Latin American countries are also producing beautiful, well-trained voices. Cesar Hernandez, from Puerto Rico, looks a bit like Domingo and has that sort of sound, and Octavio Arevalo, a young Mexican who just sang Nemorino for us, will probably be singing at the Met next season." Another company which has always prided itself on nurturing young voices is Welsh National Opera. Isabel Murphy, director of opera planning at WNO, says her top three tenors would be the British tenor Ian Bostridge, Roberto Alagna and the Argentinian Marcelo Alvarez, who recorded his debut CD, Bel Canto, with WNO last year. "There are some very interesting young British tenors, too - people like Paul Charles Clarke who also sings at the Met and around Europe, or the Welsh singer Gwyn Hughes Jones. Another exciting British tenor to come on the scene is John Daszak, who is singing Peter Grimes in our new production, and has also been booked to do the role at La Scala in the year 2000." Such is the perspective from the opera house. But what about when you walk into a record shop in search of tenors on disc? Alan Blyth, a specialist opera reviewer with Gramophone magazine, says Jose Cura would be his number one, followed by Roberto Alagna and Marcelo Alvarez.
"Cura is a very good Samson, as good as we've had for many years, and the performances on his Puccini arias disc were very fine. I think Alagna is very good provided he doesn't sing material that's too heavy for him - he's got a very appealing colour in his voice. There's also this blind chap, Bocelli. He's got a very pleasant, though not a very big, voice - and he has three or four notes in his voice that sound very like Pavarotti, but he doesn't have the exciting attack of Pavarotti."
One of the most remarkable developments on the recording front in recent months has been the huge poplar success of counter-tenors such as Andreas Scholl and David Daniels. Could it be that counter-tenors - who, after all, sing even higher than tenors - are the tenors of the future? "I hope so," says counter-tenor Jonathan Peter Kenny, who will tour Ireland with Opera Theatre Company's production of Handel's Rodelinda in May. "That would be good for me, wouldn't it?"
Kenny is himself a tenor buff, with a considerable collection of historical recordings and a soft spot for Pavarotti. "He really is wonderful. Of course, he's such a megastar, he can't really come on in an opera without playing the part of Pavarotti - but he's still a great singer. "I first went to see Jose Cura in Stiffelio at Covent Garden. It was fantastic. I'd never heard of him, but he reminded me at once of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi - it was the vibrato, I think, and also that baritonal sound which suddenly surprises you by being able to surge upwards. I like his singing very much - I think it's very honest and open and from the heart. Even from his discs he comes across as a very sincere and truthful performer." Other favourites cited by Kenny are the American Neil Shicoff, another Argentinian, Raul Gimenez and the veteran Italian Giacomo Giacomini, who "on his day is as good as I've heard".
Giacomini serves both as a good example of a tenor who made a respectable career, but never became a household name - and a salutary warning to those singers currently engaged in the frantic scramble up the ladder.
"There are far more openings for tenors than for any other voice in the profession." says Kenny. "There are fewer tenors around, and so there are lots of great roles. But it's a dangerous profession, being a tenor. You have to sing in big theatres, before huge audiences, you have to make a big sound and project your voice all the time. You've got to produce the top notes. The money notes, they call them. But you've also got to be careful because if you spend all your money notes at the beginning of your career . . . " It's a sentence which hardly bears finishing.
Jose Cura will sing in concert at the RDS on Saturday, March 13th with soprano Cara O'Sullivan and the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alistair Dawes