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[Melodie]

Sometimes a crossover attempt can make a good voice go bad

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 1/25/2004

Crossover didn't begin with the Three Tenors, but Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras gave the genre a tremendous boost because they attracted so much attention and made so much money for themselves and for the companies that produced their records and DVDs. The camaraderie of the three divos was irresistible, but they weren't very good at crossover singing -- vaulting their voices through some of the world's favorite melodies, they seemed unfamiliar with the words and the styles of the songs they were singing. When pouring out opera and Neapolitan song, they addressed the audience; when singing "Moon River," their attention was anxiously divided between the public and the music stand.

Up until the middle of the last century, it was easier for a classical singer to convince in popular music. Both kinds of singing required pretty much the same vocal range and technique. Before amplification, there was no other way any singer could be heard in a large auditorium, opera house, theater, or concert hall; classical singing technique is a natural, nonelectrified manner of amplifying the voice.

The sound of popular music began to change dramatically in the 1930s and especially in the '40s because of the widespread use of the microphone and the development of a new and less strenuous vocal technique suitable for amplification. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra led the way, and big-voiced, let-it-all-hang-out popular singers like Al Jolson began to sound old-fashioned, overwrought, and even ridiculous. All the great popular-music singers created their own styles; the job of a classical singer is to sing in a variety of styles, each according to the expectations of the composer. Still, many characteristics of classical singing remained in pop singing; Sinatra always said that his goal was to sing with a pop sound and a classical technique.

The coming of rock in the 1950s created the gap that has made it difficult for classical singers to perform popular music -- and almost impossible for popular singers to deliver classical music. Even the great pop icons failed when they attacked rock music -- Crosby's most embarrassing record is "Hey Jude." What happened with rock music is that a new and more strenuous form of vocalism came along; a classical artist would rapidly strip the gears of his voice if he tried to sing rock music the way it is supposed to sound.

And rock singers couldn't produce the kind of smooth, even sound across the entire range that classical singers are supposed to have, although with a different kind of training they might have been able to. If Paul McCartney had been born in another city and into another social class, and if he had developed an interest or an aptitude for early music, he might have become a countertenor. He certainly had the range for it. Josh Groban, who has a young voice of immense popular appeal and classical potential, is often asked why he doesn't sing more contemporary music, and his reply is self-aware -- he knows he has nothing to contribute to that genre, and that trying to would destroy his possibilities in the kinds of music his voice equips him to sing.

You might expect that it would be easier for a classical singer to perform pop music today than it was a generation or two ago -- after all, there's hardly anyone on the planet who hasn't grown up with American pop music, and nearly everyone has some kind of relationship to pop music, at least to the pop music they listened to when they were young. But crossover is seldom about classical performers singing current pop music; it's about singing traditional pre-rock pop music and show tunes, and those styles are as remote from the experience of current classical and rock singers as the styles of Gregorian chant or Faure's French melodies. Frederica von Stade and Kiri Te Kanawa had a feel for it, and the results were delovely, and so do Marilyn Horne and Bryn Terfel, who can beat the Broadway baritones at their own game.

Most of the others should forget it. Too many opera singers have had the wrong tonal quality, the wrong diction, the wrong rhythm -- and the wrong arrangements. There is a kind of arrangement that knows no period; Las Vegas lies in a land beyond time and place, and that's where the hearts of too many arrangers lie.

Of course there were always flukes, like Mario Lanza, whose ringing tenor voice in the 1950s held almost universal appeal. Lanza almost never sang opera onstage, but he sang everything in an operatic style, and a whole genre of "popera" songs like "Be My Love" was created for him. Each member of the more recent Three Tenors phenomenon has said that it was Lanza who inspired him to learn to sing, and Andrea Bocelli is a true descendant of Lanza, and another big Lanza fan. Pavarotti and Bocelli brought back the "popera" ballad. Pavarotti's recent "Ti Adoro" album was a success because he knows exactly what will work for him.

But these popera songs and singers have been so successful that now virtually every month brings forward another wannabe, most of them, like Michael Amante, pumping iron rather than singing. And people who should know better make horrible records. You would never know from his recordings of "White Christmas" that Roberto Alagna is an important singer, not a contestant on a gong show. What would Simon Cowell say to him? Michael Bolton made an opera album that included a duet from "La Boheme" with today's reigning American soprano, Renee Fleming; he might have carried it off a few years earlier, but his voice was shot by the time he tried it. A virtually untutored workingman's singer like Russell Watson became a crossover star in England, singing, among other things, Pavarotti's signature aria, "Nessun dorma."

Once when Pavarotti fell ill, Aretha Franklin sang "Nessun dorma" on the televised Grammy show -- but she had the sense to sing it in her style, not his, so it was musically successful on her terms, if not necessarily those of Puccini.

Fleming's Duke Ellington encores startle some listeners and divide her fans, who forget how much music Ellington wrote for sopranos throughout his career -- Fleming is closer to Adelaide Hall and Alice Babs than most of the singers we hear in Ellington today.

Basically crossover criteria come down to the same ones by which we evaluate every other kind of singing or musical performance -- respect for the material, taste, musicianship, style, and talent. No amount of hype can compensate for their absence.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.