BocelliOnline

[Melodie]

Andrea Bocelli/Hallam FM Arena, Sheffield
Sheena Hastings

THE lights went down in the arena, and a bearded blind man was led on to the stage. But it was the wrong one. Sheffield Brightside MP David Blunkett was surely not about to surprise us with a hitherto unheard gift for Verdi?

No, he wasn't. He was simply introducing his friend Andrea Bocelli, a man, he said, who'd decided there was a lot more money in singing than in practising law – which he had originally studied.

Bocelli, one of Pisa's most famous sons, has now sold about 50m albums worldwide, most of them dealing in crossover opera/popular romantic ballads, exploring further the terrain first chartered in a big way by The Three Tenors, when the collision of football and opera first brought Nessun Dorma to the masses.

Mr Popera certainly seems to be sneered at by those who pay big bucks to see whole operas rather than listen to what they regard as gruesome "Best of…" compilations.

So they, presumably, were not among the 13,000 crowd lapping up Bocelli's performance in Sheffield.

Accompanied by the outstanding Czech National Symphony Orchestra, whose principal violist deserves a special mention but was not named in the programme, Bocelli's repertoire for the evening was a predictable grazing across the recognisable Classic FM pastures of Puccini, Bizet, Rodrigo, Tosti, De Curtis.

His voice erupts, golden and melancholic, from a face that is mostly without expression, arms hanging by his side with no attempt at physical theatricality.

You just get the voice – a thing of beauty in itself, but one whose range is in no way tested by the material selected. Bocelli's performance offers near perfect diction and delivery by a man whose gift is, as much as anything, in the apparent ease with which he performs his miracle. Bocelli is the living proof that you don't have to be super-sized or sweat like a mule to sing like an angel. He makes a glorious sound, but there's no doubt that, vocally, he could exert himself more. It would also have been a welcome variation from the sentimentality of the pieces had a brief interlude of playful Mozart been thrown into the mix.

Bocelli's guest was the luminous soprano Paula Sanguinetti, whose vocal richness and delicacy helped to lift standards like Lehar's La Vedova Allegra into a category above mere easy listening.

14 February 2005

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