Tenor Andrea Bocelli enjoys popularity, despite critics
By Ronald Blum
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Andrea Bocelli has heard the criticism from the classical music press, which mostly concludes his voice is small, technique limited and recordings undistinguished.
Associated Press
He doesn't care. He's the best-selling classical artist in the world.
Andrea Bocelli's recordings have sold 40 million copies. He recently recorded "Tosca," and will record "Il Trovatore" in May.
"I prefer when somebody tells nice things about me," he said. "When a tenor becomes very famous, there is this problem. At the beginning, I was a little disappointed. But now I'm used to it. I read everything because I'm curious. But when I'm home, I enjoy a nice bottle of wine and it's finished."
Bocelli, who appears in staged operas despite blindness, started his fifth U.S. tour last week with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and soprano Cecilia Gasdia. He is playing arenas and the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, which uses his pop hit "Con Te Partiro" in commercials, and his recording with Sarah Brightman, "Time to Say Goodbye," as the soundtrack to one of the hotel's dramatic water shows on its lake.
His tour takes him to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; East Rutherford, N.J.; Boston; Hartford, Conn.; and Toronto.
Bocelli's new recording of Puccini's "La Boheme" with Barbara Frittoli as Mimi has sold 200,000 copies, and his Verdi arias disc has sold 400,000, raising his total to about 40 million recordings sold. (His "Romanza," his debut international album, sold 15.8 million, and "Sogno," 6.7 million.)
Philips Classics is releasing a Verdi "Requiem" this month that has Bocelli singing among some of classical music's biggest stars.
Bocelli, 42, has just recorded "Tosca" with soprano Fiorenza Cedolins, baritone Carlo Guelfi and conductor Zubin Mehta; and in May he is to record Verdi's "Il Trovatore."
"Everyone wants to work with me because I'm a good singer and I'm a good colleague," he said during a telephone interview from Italy earlier this month. "When I say I'm ready for a recording, I'm really prepared. They also know that our recording will be the most-sold in the world."
That's no small feat given that there are dozens of "Boheme" recordings on the market.
Bocelli, who became famous as an Italian pop singer, is so closely miked in the "Boheme" that it sounds like he's singing in a tiny, tiled bathroom. Frittoli and the others, who have much stronger voices, have more normal acoustics.
In both the Puccini and the Verdi, words and phrases come off largely with the same values, with little color. It shows just how hard classical singing is, and points out that even conservatory students have better technique. "Celeste Aida" is the most successfully sung of the 15 arias on the Verdi disc, and it's merely passable.
His only U.S. opera engagement, Massenet's "Werther" with Denyce Graves at Detroit's Michigan Opera Theater on Oct. 29, 1999, got mostly negative reviews.
"Heard without the souped-up amplification of his arena concerts, Bocelli's voice was revealed as an imperfect instrument," Lawrence A. Johnson wrote in Opera News. "Even the slight rasp in his timbre that gives his singing an expressive poignancy sounded raw and ragged, his unschooled technique roughhewn at best. In Werther's invocation to nature, Bocelli's tone was startlingly emaciated; top notes were barely hit and hardly sustained."
Bocelli shrugs off comments like those.
"If you read the newspaper, you will see for (Jose) Cura, for (Luciano) Pavarotti, it's the same thing," he said.
