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[Melodie]

A royal assist for Bocelli: Westminster singers revel in Christmas tour spectacle
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
BY WILLA J. CONRAD
Star-Ledger Staff

Andrea Bocelli is at the microphone. Stage lights are off, his face is cast in shadow. He's making clicking noises with his tongue, every once in a while bursting into an Italian aria, then stopping to converse, partly in English, with his personal sound engineer, flown in by private jet.

It was tech rehearsal at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford on Sunday afternoon, and the superstar crossover tenor, who anchors this year's "A Royal Christmas" tour, along with Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, was testing the sound system that would turn a 20,000-seat sports arena into a concert hall that night. (The tour continues to Chicago, Phoenix and Fresno, Calif., this week.)

Divided on either side of his stage was the choir that sparked the idea for the holiday spectacle -- alumni and students from the Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, which regularly provides choirs to sing and record with the New York Philharmonic and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, among others.

"To get to perform in a venue like this makes us feel like rock stars," says alto Eleonore Thomas, a Westminster alum from Delaware. Adds soprano Kristeen Kates, Class of '02, "It's exhilarating to hear the cheers and screams -- we're used to applause and cheering, the occasional 'bravissimo,' but the screaming is new, even though we know it's for Bocelli."

All for warbling a few Christmas carols, the kind of fare these singers, trained to tangle with complicated contemporary scores, could sing lying down and with a bad head cold.

How came these Westminster singers to be covered with smoke from dry ice, roasted under stage lights, and amped to the max with microphones wedged around them?

"My wife and I attended their annual 'Readings and Carols' concert at Princeton University chapel one year, and I thought, 'This is a great show, we've got to take it on the road!,'" says Ed Kasses, head of Princeton Entertainment Organization, the tour's producer. Approached by the enthusiastic Kasses, who is a graduate of Rider University (though not the choir college), Westminster dean Robert Annis was taken aback.

"My first reaction was caution," says Annis, who is wandering in the arena's vast, empty cavern. "At the same time, we can't be naive. This is part of the music industry. I would love to think the world cares about Brahms' Requiem, and our primary mission is to ensure that it does. But if this were a show that PBS might eventually be interested in taping -- think of the audience we'd reach! It's about marketing. If I felt we were compromising the name of the school, we wouldn't do it."

What Kasses and his company have created is the aesthetic antithesis to the school's "Readings and Carols" (scheduled Friday and Saturday in Princeton), which is modeled on the high church, English choral service "Lessons & Carols" out of King's College.

One is about the human voice in natural acoustics, pageantry, choirs and bells. "A Royal Christmas" is pure entertainment. Every sound is mediated through a massive sound system, and it is a patchwork of showy performances by Bocelli (who sings sacred arias and carols -- sometimes with added Italian verses -- for the first time in the U.S.) and Graves (doing carols, not opera), excerpts from the ballet "The Nutcracker" with a United Nations cast of dancers, and choral holiday music.

"(My) fees as orchestra leader will certainly help -- times are tough right now for freelancers in London, and my wife and I are just buying a little flat in the country," says orchestra concertmaster John Bradbury.

The orchestra is actually two ensembles: the high-end Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and freelancers from its "pops" ensemble, the Concert Orchestra.

"We know we're not playing Mahler, but we give it our best," Bradbury says. "You get stability from the regular orchestra members, and enthusiasm and focus from the freelance members, who all want to be invited back."

For the singers, the compensation is less an appeal. "I actually make less doing this than if I was home teaching voice and piano in Brooklyn these two weeks," says Westminster alum and soprano Wendy Butler, "but it's novel to be backing singers with voices that inspire."

Will highly trained classical performers benefit by adding a Bocelli tour to their résumé? Bocelli, who possesses a warm, large and naturally emotive voice, but doesn't have the technical command or nuance that extended opera performance demands, presents a perpetual dilemma: Pop critics avoid him because he's too highly trained; classical critics avoid him because he's not trained enough. Even Bocelli's modesty and sincerity have not yet bridged the gap, though his fan base is huge.

"You notice certain, uh, pedagogical things about his singing, but the natural beauty of his voice is phenomenal," says Butler. All choristers were impressed, Thomas says, when Bocelli, delayed by flight troubles in Italy, arrived late for a dress rehearsal last week in Atlantic City.

He walked off the plane, onto the stage and, in jeans and without rehearsal or warm-up, sang three songs for an audience that had waited three hours for him," says Thomas. "I have great respect for him."

THE STAR-LEDGER