Placido Domingo At 70: 134 Roles – And Counting

Wrong.

His birthday was Jan. 21 and now, a month later, he will reach an audience of several million Saturday in a Metropolitan Opera performance of Gluck’s “Iphigenie en Tauride.” It will be beamed in real time to 1,500 movie theaters worldwide, plus radio and streaming Internet.

“What can I do? I’m still feeling in good voice!” says Domingo, sitting and relaxing in the Met’s sunny grand entrance.

“But I’m a mess!” he joked as he cooled down and straightened his shirt after conducting a rehearsal of Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” – squeezed on off days between performances of “Iphigenie.”

Less than a year after his successful colon cancer surgery, he’s still general director of both the Los Angeles Opera and the Washington National Opera, while recording, conducting and singing.

The thick waves of his now silver hair frame an animated face that does not hide his age.

“You have to keep the sound fresh,” he says. “I mean, most of the tenor roles, they are young!”

Domingo is a conductor as well as an artist who has a record-setting 134 career roles; the celebrated tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Enrico Caruso performed far less – Caruso about 60 roles, Pavarotti fewer than that.

Domingo is booked through 2015 and still adding roles at an age when most top-notch singers retire from the stage. He regularly sells out theaters including the Met’s 3,800-seat auditorium.

“Very few singers can sing at all at the age of 70 – he sounds great; it’s absolutely extraordinary,” says James Conlon, music director of the Los Angeles Opera who was former principal conductor of the Paris National Opera and frequent guest conductor at the Met.

Conlon, 60, first heard Domingo in 1966 in New York and has worked with him for decades.

“If he just had a career that lasted 20 years, singing tenor roles in the Italian repertory, that would have been enough to assure his greatness in history,” Conlon said.

But Domingo expanded his repertoire to Wagnerian roles that demand huge vocal power beyond Italian lyricism, and Verdi’s taxing “Otello,” which music pundits warned would ruin his voice. And last year, Domingo took on a brand new work – as the poet Pablo Neruda in the Los Angeles world premiere of Daniel Catan’s “Il Postino,” based on the film.

“I think he’s a force of nature,” Conlon said. “He’s insatiable and it never stops; it’s a lifelong drive that probably ensures that you will never stop being productive.”

Domingo acknowledges that he’s no longer comfortable with the highest tenor notes, and in recent years has taken on parts that show off his rich, vibrant middle and lower registers.

Among them is Orestes in “Iphigenie” – an ancient Greek drama about the anguished Iphigenie, Agamemnon’s daughter, who is forced to serve her enemies as a high priestess and ordered to sacrifice Orestes. He turns out to be her brother.

The Stephen Wadsworth-staged production debuted at the Met in November 2007.

Domingo has stepped into the baritone repertoire that reaches about an octave or so lower than the tenor range to mixed success. He’s sung the baritone leads in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” and “Rigoletto.” And he’s polishing the part of Athanael in “Thais,” by Jules Massenet, to mark the centennial of the French composer’s death next year.

“Despite his determined efforts to darken his tone and give added weight to the lower register, there’s little Domingo could do about the natural placement of his voice,” critic Mike Silverman wrote for The Associated Press. However, he said, “The voice had its familiar warm and muscular sound. The technique remains rock-solid.”

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote, “I almost hesitate to praise him, since I do not want him to get ideas.”

Such challenges have never derailed the determined, self-propelled Domingo, whose career did not come easy.

“It was very difficult when I came to the Met. There was a very, very great generation of tenors here and Pavarotti and I came the same year,” he says, glancing at the white-stone-and-red-velvet Met foyer with its massive crystal chandelier.

This is his artistic home, where he has appeared in 46 roles since his debut in 1968, when he stepped in at the last hour for an ailing Franco Corelli.

Domingo’s operatic career started a half-century ago in Mexico, at a time when performers traveled by ship and recorded on vinyl.

Now, says the jet-setting tenor, companies behind digital CDs and DVDs require in-person promotion and publicity interviews. When his career started, he says, “You just recorded, and you didn’t do anything else. It is a lot more difficult now” – as the music industry struggles.

The Met introduced its Emmy Award-winning “Live in HD” series four years ago to lure a worldwide audience to its shows – for the price of a $22 movie ticket in the United States. The telecasts – a dozen each season – have proven so popular that it’s often easier to see an actual New York performance than to snag a movie ticket at a suburban mall.

Domingo is ready to take on whatever high-tech approach can popularize his art, including the HD shows in which cameras at the edge of the Met stage zoom in on the singers with unforgiving close shots. And he hopes jokingly that cameras on him “keep a little distance!” so they won’t highlight that he’s not as young as the youth he plays, Orestes.

“But I don’t feel like I’m 70,” he says, laughing at the prediction he made when he was in his early 60s: “I don’t want to be 70 and still singing opera,” he was quoted as saying by Britain’s Independent newspaper. “I don’t think I will still be singing on 21 January 2011, which is my 70th birthday.”

On his birthday, he did not sing. A tearful Domingo was honored at the Teatro Real in his native Madrid, Spain, serenaded onstage by fellow musicians at a celebration hosted by Spain’s king and queen.

Domingo continues to work with the kind of feverish energy more often seen in young artists trying to establish a reputation. His stamina comes naturally; he doesn’t do anything special to enhance it, he says, “except I just try to eat healthy.”

As for his vocal future, “I just don’t know,” he says with an easy grin. But as long as his voice “sounds fresh and healthy, I will still be looking for parts. Let’s see!”