Profile: He has sold millions of records, and is held up as the successor to Pavarotti, but his critics say he is little more than a crooner dressed up as an opera singer, writes Arminta Wallace
When Andrea Bocelli takes to the stage at Pearse Stadium, Galway tonight - and at Nowlan Park, Kilkenny tomorrow - an awful lot of people are going to be hoping he has been sucking his Strepsils. Some of those people will be clutching tickets for which they've paid a whopping €155. Others will have fished out and dusted off their tickets for the concerts which were cancelled when, earlier this month, the 48-year-old Italian heart-throb came down with what his doctor called "acute laryngo-tracheitis". A sore throat, to you and me.
Still, here he is, hale and hearty, and, as the promoters hastened to make clear, all tickets already purchased would be valid for the new dates. So everyone's happy. Or are they? For a guy who sings disposable songs in an unremarkable light tenor, Bocelli arouses intriguing amounts of adoration and apoplexy.
The adoration comes mostly from his fans. "You are the light that stirs our emotions," somebody by the name of "Randy" assures Bocelli on one website. It is also, however, fanned by the not-inconsiderable marketing power and expertise of Universal Records, for whom Bocelli has shifted well over 40 million albums worldwide in the last decade. Which - or so the theory goes - casts him, and other bestselling crossover artists such as Russell Watson, Katharine Jenkins and Il Divo, in the role of saviour of the dying art of classical music.
The apoplexy comes from within classical music itself. Opera buffs tend to regard Bocelli as a fiver dressed up as a tenor. When he records albums of over-exposed MOR classics and slushy Italian pop songs, critics pounce on the fact that he isn't engaging with operatic repertoire; when he engages with the repertoire, they close in for the kill. "The latest in the dismal series of opera recordings featuring the absurdly over-marketed tenor," was how the Guardian's opera critic, Andrew Clements, greeted Bocelli's attempt at Verdi's Il Trovatore in 2004, noting the singer's "profoundly unmusical contribution" and "unvaryingly coarse tone".
NOT THAT EVERYBODY in classical circles is anti-Bocelli. Also taking to the stage in Ireland this weekend - admittedly the rather smaller stage of the Orangerie at Kilruddery House, Co Wicklow, where a series of Sunday opera galas is being staged - is the young soprano Celine Byrne, student of Veronica Dunne and committed Bocelli fan. "I think he's great," she says. "I love him. These debates about who can sing better than who always go on in classical music. Look at Maria Callas. Lots of people loved her - and lots of people hated her as well.
"They said, 'No, no, she sings flat and her top notes are all screechy', or whatever. But for me it's all about performance. She was a fantastic performer, and Andrea Bocelli is terrific in concert. It's as simple as that." But is it? Byrne goes on to describe seeing Bocelli singing a duet from The Pearl Fishers at last year's BBC Proms with a baritone whose name - significantly - she can't recall. "The baritone was acting out the song, with hand gestures and so on. Bocelli couldn't do that, of course. But you could hear the intensity within his voice. I think that the words are more sensuous to him because he's blind."
Born with congenital glaucoma, Bocelli was blinded at the age of 12 by a cerebral haemorrhage, brought on by a blow on the head during a soccer game. His disability - or rather, the courage with which he has faced and conquered it - seems to bring out the nurturing instinct in many of his fans, especially the female ones. It inspired a woman called Margot McMahon to pen a poem for the Galway Advertiser ahead of his concert in that city. It contains the lines, "Who cares for you behind the scenes/trims your dark beard, combs your hair,/chooses the colour you will wear?" and concludes, "I could not bear to see you lonely/in your dark world/where no one ever sees your eyes."
No one can deny the warmth and humanity of such impulses. On the other hand, in the coldly competitive world of late global capitalism, Bocelli's blindness does make him eminently marketable. For cultural commentator, London Evening Standard columnist and author of a number of books on trends in classical music, Norman Lebrecht, the deal is savagely straightforward.
"Bocelli is, plain and simple, a San Remo smoocher who was snapped up by desperate classical labels as a marketing gimmick," he has written. "It's the blind leading the deaf." The editor of Opera magazine, John Allison, takes a more measured view. "He's famous as the blind tenor. That's horrible, but it's true. His voice is not in any way exceptional. It's not terrible, either. When they put the microphone down his tonsils he makes a reasonable go of it. But if he wasn't blind, he just wouldn't stand out from the crowd."
AS THE ARGUMENTS rage, the wedge between classical music and the rest of the world gets just a tiny bit wider. Another irony: for wasn't crossover supposed to break down boundaries and get everybody bopping happily ever after? But that, as Allison points out, was in the good old days of Italia 90. "After the use of Nessun Dorma as a World Cup theme and the Three Tenors phenomenon everybody said opera would become more popular," he says. "Well, Nessun Dorma became more popular - but opera didn't.
"There's a long tradition of people singing opera arias in concert, and there's nothing wrong with that," he adds. What the crossover marketing people do, however, is piggy-back on this tradition. "The popular misconception is that if anybody is vaguely classical or vocally trained, then they're 'operatic'," he says. "Katharine Jenkins is routinely described as 'the operatic soprano', which is nonsense. Look at the repertoire. Whatever it is, it's not operatic." The same could, no doubt, be said of the programme for the Bocelli concerts this weekend.
True, he'll probably work Nessun Dorma, and Mimi's perpetually frozen fingers, into the mix somewhere. But it's worth a bet that he'll devote a fair proportion of the evening to tracks from his most recent album, Amore - which features Can't Help Falling in Love and a smoothie called Somos Novios which, when Perry Como used to deliver it to our ears, was known as It's Impossible.
For Bernard Clarke, Lyric FM presenter and regular classical record reviewer, Andrea Bocelli has - at least partly - filled the very large gap in the musical marketplace left by the disappearance of Luciano Pavarotti. More to the point, he says, he fills a gap in the Irish psyche. Clarke's theory is that Bocelli combines our historic love of male singers - think Joyce in Ulysses, think Josef Locke, think the plethora of Irish tenors doing the rounds - with the new-found affluence of the Celtic Tiger and our current love affair with holidays in romantic, sun-drenched places. However spurious, Bocelli's "classical" tag gives him the cachet which lifts him, in their view, above the singers with whom he really merits comparison: Barry Manilow, perhaps, or Johnny Mathis, or maybe even James Blunt.
In which case, Irish Bocelli fans should make hay while the sun shines. Even the briefest glance at what passes for a "classical" chart these days shows it to be a dismal jumble of compilations: music for babies, music for weddings, music for dinner tables - the same few pieces of music repackaged for the umpteenth time. At this rate classical cachet is almost certainly bound to become a thing of the passé, faster than you can sing "just one Cornetto".
The Bocelli File
Who is he?
Multimillion-album-selling Italian tenor - if you love him. Crooner, if you don't
Why is he in the news?
He's performing two concerts in Ireland this weekend, in Galway and Kilkenny
Most appealing characteristic?
His bottom. No, not that one. We're talking a nicely rounded baritone here, okay?
Least appealing characteristic?
Let's be honest. His top. He's not so much a belter as a bleater
Most likely to say:
"The ambition of my whole life is to become a great tenor"
Least likely to say:
"That's that done, then"