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THE BOCELLI PHENOMENON
By Tim Smith
In a world continually spun by marketing hype, the word "phenomenon" gets bandied about all too freely. But if anyone has earned the right to it, it's Andrea Bocelli. The Tuscan tenor with a distinctive flair for pop ballads and a passion for opera has sold more than 50 million recordings, given concerts in huge arenas, and been the focus of several high-profile television specials. It's a career unprecedented in the swiftness and scope of its development.
But as much as Bocelli can be viewed as a phenomenon, with all of the uniqueness that implies, he is also very much a part of a long, noble line of singers who have shared one of the secrets of his success -- the genre-bending, audience-stretching talent classified as "crossover." Long before anyone coined that word (its original usage has to do with record sales that registered on more than one chart -- rock and country, for example, or jazz and blues), singers sang anything that appealed to them.
A century ago, labels and categories were not always as stringently applied or insisted upon. Purists who balk at Bocelli's incursions into Verdi, Puccini, or Massenet may have forgotten how legendary Italian tenor Enrico Caruso embraced popular Neapolitan songs and even belted out an all-American hit by George M. Cohan. And Caruso was hardly alone in his versatility.
John McCormack, in particular, set a crossover standard that is hard to match. This personable Irish tenor moved back and forth between classical and popular repertoire with disarming ease in the 1920s and 1930s. His taste in Tin Pan Alley tunes may not have been as infallible as his taste in arias (or Irish folk songs), but McCormack could put across any piece of music, thanks to the inherent beauty of his voice and the communicative power in his phrasing -- qualities frequently attributed to Bocelli.
Several opera stars over the decades have continued this crossover tradition. In the 1950s, eminent Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel ran afoul of the Metropolitan Opera's management when she kept slipping out to nightclubs to sing pop standards. Not long after, another leading soprano, Eileen Farrell, had similar problems getting people to accept both sides of her musical personality; she famously declared her viewpoint by recording a record album titled I GOTTA RIGHT TO SING THE BLUES.
Some opera stars save pop pieces for encores or parties (Birgit Nilsson having a romp through "I Could Have Danced All Night," for example). Others go the distance, like Kiri Te Kanawa, who made a successful Gershwin album, or Renée Fleming, who has recorded a soon-to-be-released jazz CD.
But while the practice of traveling from opera into pop is relatively common, it's a lot harder to find pop singers stepping onto classical turf. Barbra Streisand made a fascinating effort in the 1960s; on her album CLASSICAL BARBRA, she tries out works by Handel, Schumann, Debussy, and others. She doesn't make any substantial change in her vocal technique, though; this is very much a pop singer's version of the classics. In 1998, Michael Bolton plunged fearlessly into his "secret passion" -- opera arias. Although the passion certainly came through, along with some pretty impressive high notes, the sound was that of a pop voice stretching its usual borders, not really crossing over with both feet solidly on the ground.
It's worth recalling such cases when considering the Bocelli phenomenon. Opera purists, in particular, need the occasional reminder about the deep-seeded history of dual-genre singers. But this is still only half of the story.
Top banner photos: Special guest Holly Stell, tenor Andrea Bocelli, and champion ice dancers Renee Roca and Gorsha Sur. |
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Brian Boitano is the most recent male American skater to win gold at the Olympics, in 1988. |
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Ekaterina Gordeeva began a solo career after the death of her husband and skating partner, Sergei Grinkov. |
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