BocelliOnline

[Melodie]

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003

By Robert Everett-Green
From Monday's Globe and Mail

EXCERPTS:
In a pivotal scene in Robert Altman's film Gosford Park, the British matinee idol Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Northam) entertains a parlour full of guests at a country manor in the early thirties by crooning his own songs from the piano.

Novello was a real figure, whose hugely popular stage shows provided what critic Kenneth Tynan called "fulsome Zenda-ish glimpses into the private worlds of mythical kings and queens," furnished with tunes everyone could whistle.

Such shows are doubly nostalgic today, because by Novello's death in 1951 singers such as Frank Sinatra had erased the need for a bridge between high and low music culture. Or so it seemed, till Andrea Bocelli came along.

Almost single-handedly, Bocelli has restored and exploited the magnetic tension between pop and high-class music that made Novello a wealthy man. Over the past eight years, the Italian tenor has sold more than 43 million records. That's more than Pavarotti, and more than the Three Tenors, whose Sinatra covers and televised mega-shows proved to some extent that what Bocelli is doing could be done.

His latest album, Sentimento,entered the Billboard Top 200 chart at No. 12, at a time when the classical recording industry is sick or dying. A lot of people would like some of that action, which is why there's now a small brigade of singers offering their versions of Bocelli's operatic romance. Josh Groban, Russell Watson, Mario Frangoulis and Alessandro Safina are all having the kind of commercial success that blue-chip opera stars such as Canadian Ben Heppner will likely never see. Half of the titles on the classical Top 10 in Canada belong to Groban, Bocelli and Watson. Two of the others are by teen soprano Charlotte Church and the Opera Babes, who have been cleaning up on the less lucrative female side of the pop-classical gold rush.

Enrico Caruso had a bigger impact on the history of recorded music ("People did not really begin to buy gramophones until the appearance of the Caruso records," Compton Mackenzie wrote in 1924), but unlike Lanza's, Caruso's career was firmly based on his opera appearances. Lanza is the model for Bocelli's set, and for every operatic singer who dreams of mass success. Like Lanza, they mix romantic classical numbers with pop tunes that flatter an operatic sound -- even when, as in Groban's or Watson's case, the full technique of an operatic voice is missing.

The sound of these pop-operatic voices functions like a piece of Limoges china, that dignifies and elevates whatever is served on it. Groban's repertoire of romantic ballads is mostly pap, and there's very little range in the way he performs it. But his sound implies something rare and strange, which has been miraculously transported from a non-pop universe and adapted to a purpose that requires no high-class musical knowledge to understand. His faun-like appearance confirms his otherworldy appeal and projects the kind of sensitive masculinity that three decades of feminism have endorsed as the only kind worth dreaming about.

Bocelli is still the prince of that kind of sexuality, thanks to his cozy but sensual demeanour, his honeyed tones, and his intimate style...

The thing that maddens the classical guardians most of all is that Bocelli has not faded away, as many thought he would. The public has not tired of soft-focus classical-style singers, or of the limp ballads and faux-religious ditties they so often sing. On the contrary, the demand for their labours seems to be growing. Many of us still want to hear the sounds of high-class romance, whether we've got a seat in the parlour or merely a hiding place in the hall.

Like Bocelli and every other purveyor of pop bel canto, Novello was clever enough to read the dreams of his public, and make them seem true.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030224.wtenors/BNStory/Entertainment

[DeSerio]

Melodie, vey nicely worded enjoyed that read
remember everyone out there it's all about heart in everything we do
when the heart is involved, it shines through heart and passion it shows in Bocelli's music that's why it touches our souls it's more than just music it fills our very beings, cleanes our spirits if God has a voice
i cant imagine it sounding like anyone else Viva, Andrea Bocelli and great music everywhere ciao!

[Melodie]

Hi Mike, I'm glad you enjoyed it - and thanks for expressing yourself.