Readers may have been intrigued, as I have, by placards in the London Underground and elsewhere advertising a gallery of today’s greatest tenors, with the predictable portraits of Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras flanked by one of Andrea Bocelli. My wonderment is now answered, for this is Bocelli’s first operatic disc, a formidable collection of arias including even the Tenor’s aria from Der Rosenkavalier.
Already Bocelli has appeared in the pop charts with a disc, recorded in partnership with Sarah Brightman, which reached No. 1. Not that that in any way raised my hopes for this operatic issue, rather the opposite, and there is a sequence of Puccini arias here – the two from Tosca, one from Butterfly – which, slow and heavy, made me for a time apprehensive, despite the promisingly detailed account of “Che gelida manina” which precedes them.
Bocelli’s great natural gift is a powerful tenor of very distinctive timbre, not conventionally rounded in a Pavarotti-like way but above all virile with a baritonal tinge, used over a wide tonal range with not a suspicion of strain. He soars readily to a top C or even a C sharp, as in “A te, o cara” from Bellini’s I puritani. And though in the nine top Cs of Tonio’s “Pour mon ame” from La fille du regiment – the final rip-roaring item here – he cannot quite match the flamboyance of Pavarotti, there are all too few recording tenors who could do it so confidently, or even at all.
What more than anything has had my scepticism evaporating is the less obvious items, as for example “Cielo e mar!” from Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, where, quite apart from the delicate shading of tone, word meaning is sensitively brought out. No one could dismiss this as a tenor just belting out the music, and Werther’s “Pourquoi me reveiller?” – among the most testing of French arias – inspires Bocelli to produce very refined mezza voce, beautifully sustained, set against a well-controlled expansion in each stanza. The Flower song from Carmen too is subtler than most, as one registers from the very opening, so often sung at a full forte.
What understandably the booklet does not mention is that Bocelli has been blind from boyhood, which has sadly barred him from staged opera. That being so, his career to date is impressive, not just musically but in the way that he qualified and practised as a lawyer before turning to his first love, music. He then went to study with Franco Corelli, the tenor he specially admires. Though this is a weighty voice for Bellinian and Donizettian bel canto, with ornaments not as delicate as they might be and with the occasional bump in legato lines, there is ample evidence of lessons well learnt. The repertory is commendably varied too, including as it does Maurizio’s aria from Adriana Lecouvreur and Marcello’s aria from Leoncavallo’s La boheme.
After Bocelli’s success in the pop field, this is a disc obviously aimed above all at what one might call the “Three Tenors” market, but that need not deter others. The reservations I have over the heavy treatment of some items, with sluggish speeds, unpersuasive phrasing and occasionally slack ensemble, are, I suspect, at least as much the fault of the conductor as of Bocelli himself. Fluency and ease will no doubt soon develop further.'