BocelliOnline

[Anna in NY]

Posted on Thu, Nov. 30, 2006
Handsome tenor's star quality stumps the critics
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ

In the end, as postmodernism reminds us, it all boils down to a question of language.

Is Andrea Bocelli, who will perform Friday at Hard Rock Live at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, a pop singer or an operatic tenor? Opera critics say he is not the latter. Bocelli, who sings arias in his concerts and recordings, insists he is both.

On the phone from Italy, he puts it this way. ``Pop and operatic music are now two different languages, like English and Italian. A singer who wants to sing this kind of repertoire needs to learn both languages.''

The Italian idol is speaking English, with an interpreter standing by on conference call from New York to translate when he can't understand the question.

Asked if he would rather speak Spanish, Bocelli declines. ''I speak better in English,'' he says, ``but the sound of Italian is much closer to Spanish.''

In his concerts and recordings, Bocelli sings in both Spanish and English -- besides his native Italian. Indeed, the round vowels of Spanish and Italian make his pronunciation in the former sound natural. In English, he suddenly becomes more hard-edged, but just as natural.

''That's because when I was in the university I played a lot of piano bars,'' the tenor says. ``I sang Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Presley. That was the repertoire of my green years.''

Today he listens to everything, he says, including rap, particularly when the rappers are Italian. ''It's a nice, modern way to write poems,'' Bocelli says.

But if rap is today a universal musical idiom with lyrics in every language, popular music was not much different about a century ago.

In the years of Enrico Caruso, an operatic tenor who became one of the world's first pop icons, ''a tenor would sing popular songs with the same vocality that he used in the opera,'' Bocelli says.

``Rock music went away from operatic vocality. I use the same breathing for both pop and opera, but the expression has to be different.''

In spite of these differences, Bocelli has enjoyed enormous success with a mix of operatic arias and pop songs in a style full of operatic overtones. His recent CD Amore has topped a Billboard category tailor-made for Bocelli: classical crossover.

Still, opera critics have been underwhelmed, primarily because Bocelli, like all pop singers, uses amplification in live venues -- an operatic no-no.

The Miami Herald's James Roos said in 2001 that ``when he does sing without mics, critics seem unanimous that he lacks the sheer power and volume for operatic music.''

Sitting close enough to the tenor to hear him at a concert where the amplification failed momentarily, Roos said, ``Bocelli's voice virtually petered out to nothing.''

The tenor agrees with the opera world that singing without amplification is ''voice in the pure way.'' But he argues that pop venues do not have good acoustics, like opera houses, so amplification is required.

''I do this [sing without amplification] when I sing in the theater,'' he says. ``It's the most enjoyable way to sing.''

He is planning a production of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier next year. ''A big challenge, a terrible effort,'' he says.

Florida Grand Opera's managing director for marketing and communication, Justin Moss, believes Bocelli's influence on the genre has been very positive. ''We are grateful that he has reached millions and millions of people who would not otherwise be hearing operatic music,'' Moss says.

Moss believes Bocelli's enormous popularity singing arias has exposed his fans to the beauty of the genre, regardless of his unconventional -- according to opera's rules -- use of amplification.

Bocelli himself points to his four sold-out Avery Fisher Hall concerts with the New York Philharmonic in September, where ``we were entirely without amplification.''

On that occasion, however, The New York Times' Bernard Holland wrote that ''the critic's duty is to report that Mr. Bocelli is not a very good singer,'' merely acknowledging that ``to his credit, Mr. Bocelli sings mostly in tune.''

But Holland admitted that ''there is something physical or metaphysical -- something beyond music -- that must draw people to Andrea Bocelli.'' That. Holland said, throwing in the critical towel, ``is a talent in itself.''

It helps, of course, that Bocelli is good looking. Add to that the poignancy of his blindness. And that his audiences, whether hearing him amplified, as they will at the Hard Rock in Hollywood, or not, as they did at Avery Fisher Hall, are familiar with his recorded -- thus, amplified and tweaked in every way, like all pop vocals -- material.

''Impossible to say why,'' is Bocelli's answer to the reason for his success.

``The only thing I can say is that I try with all my forces to find inspiration from my life, from my love, from my experience of every day. In one word, from my heart.

``And the people understand.''
Article link:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/music/16120221.htm
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Note from Anna: Reading Andrea's above final quote caused me to reflect back to what I wrote on 9/12/06 under Avery Fischer Hall performance reports :

"........To my ear, he is always honest in the emotion he brings. This is never forced or affected. He loves what he does. It shows. We share it. And we love it too. "

_________________
Beddu Turridu !!!!!!!!!!!!

[Janice]

It's always great to read comments from THE MAN but I think this piece could have done without the secondhand remarks from other critics. If this writer had no personal experience of Andrea, why choose to let others speak for him? And considering he DID choose to go that route, why only quote negative comments??? The comment about Andrea's voice "petering out" when there was an amplification glitch made no sense. IF it happened, it surely happened because there is no way Andrea sings at full voice into a microphone. DUH! He's said many times that singing into a microphone is like singing into the ear of a child. NATURALLY a person doesn't sing at the volume required to be heard in an arena when they are singing into the ear of a child. Think about it! Geez!