The veteran Spanish tenor José Carreras, 79, will return to Australia later this year to headline a major outdoor concert at Brisbane’s Gabba alongside pop-rock stars Robbie Williams, Ronan Keating and Natalie Imbruglia and the Irish folk pop group The Corrs. 

The Carreras & Friends bill also features former Savage Garden frontman Darren Hayes, Brisbane pop group Sheppard, Heart singer Ann Wilson, Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins and Australian tenor Mark Vincent. 

The show is part of the same cultural investment strategy from the Queensland Government that brought Sting to the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s new Glasshouse Theatre with his touring musical The Last Ship.

José Carreras. Portrait supplied

Accompanied by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and choir in a production involving around 90 musicians, the “hits and duets” format concert – inspired by the Pavarotti & Friends events that brought together opera and popular music stars in Italy during the 1990s and early 2000s – comes two years after the unexplained cancellation of Carreras’s planned 2024 tour with fellow Three Tenors star Plácido Domingo.

Carreras has enjoyed a long relationship with Australian audiences. In 2017 he toured the country with his farewell-themed...