Gifted but Terribly Conflicted

The Sports Arena here filled all 11,000 of its seats Wednesday night. But this time there was no wait at the pizza or beer counters. The candy-apple vendors might just as well have stayed home. But the cappuccino carts were overwhelmed. Genuine concern snaked through one long line of well-dressed patrons when decaf ran out a half-hour before the show.

“Well, at least you’re lucky,” a disappointed woman said to me as she left the line to buy some $27 T-shirts instead. “Now you’ll have a shorter wait, and once inside you’ll be surrounded by a sea of females.”

Andrea Bocelli, who has begun an arena tour heading up the West Coast (with a date at the Hollywood Bowl on April 24), is an Italian tenor with a splendid voice, an adoring public, a new CD (“Sogno”) that entered the pop charts at No. 4 last week and a very strange career.

In fact, once inside the teaming arena, I was surrounded by a sea of couples. Bocelli, who is blind and appears shy and vulnerable on stage has become a romantic figure for an audience of middle-age women. Hearing their screams, I was reminded of a Beatles concert I once attended, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many in the audience were the same screamers, 35 years later. But the men were even louder with their piercing whistles. And while the audience wasn’t exactly a hoard of teenagers, it seemed more mixed than one might have predicted--fashionable young people, their parents and their grandparents.

What was even more unusual is that Bocelli, with a certain obstinance, saved the romantic pop ballads that have made him famous for his encores. He was presented with all the trappings of a pop performer--his own traveling stage, sound system, large-screen video screens and gaudy lighting. But his back-up musicians were the San Diego Symphony. His program was operatic excerpts. An impressive young Puerto Rican soprano, Ana Maria Martinez, joined him for duets and two arias of her own. Marcello Rota, who conducted, spelled the singers with opera overtures and a Brahms Hungarian Dance.

The effect was peculiar. Bocelli’s mantra in interviews is opera. He became a pop singer because no one was likely to take a blind opera singer seriously, and he got a few lucky breaks. But he has paid the price for that luck, and he now is doubly hindered. He has not just his physical disability to overcome, but he also has the apparatus of the pop world to contend with. It is a burden, the blindness and the adoration. It is also an extraordinary opportunity.

The singer I heard Wednesday seemed immensely gifted but terribly conflicted. He has so little stage presence that he is in effect an anti-show-biz show-biz phenomenon. He stands motionless, head bent down. He doesn’t acknowledge his audience or the other performers. Totally withdrawn, he makes it seem as if the music comes from somewhere deep inside him, or maybe he is nothing more than a spiritual medium through which it pours.

That worked well enough when he sang one of his signature pop tunes, “The Prayer,” as an encore, bathed in a hokey glowing white light on a darkened staged. But what a gloomy presence he makes singing the extroverted music “La donna e mobile” from “Rigoletto.” Rather than a vivacious toast, the drinking song from “La Traviata,” which he sang with a more lively Martinez, seemed like something angry.

Without amplification, Bocelli is said to have an undistinguished voice. That may be, but he also has a voice the microphone loves; in that regard, he could be another Frank Sinatra or Caruso. He could even make a breakthrough in the use of amplification in opera, which thus far has been unsatisfactory whenever attempted. Unfortunatley, he leaves too much to his sound crew, allowing others to manipulate his dynamics.

Yet in other matters, he takes much into his own hands. He didn’t appear to accept musical direction at all in this concert. His phrasing was willful and often clumsy. He woos his listeners with tastelessly held notes, and every number has them--long and predictable. The result is a kind of perverse egotism. On the one hand he is an entirely introverted singer, on the other he calls excessive attention to himself.

It is also not a musically very serious defect. The voice and musicality are interesting and, one suspects, so is the intellect. Were this overly cautious, self-indulgent, passive-aggressive singer to put himself in the hands of first-rate conductors and coaches, were he to put himself at the service of the music, to develop a genuine microphone technique and make a more active pact with the audience, he just might become a memorable, even historic, opera singer.

Certainly that is his ambition. In February, he recorded “La Boheme” with Zubin Mehta conducting, and we await the results; in the fall he will sing “Werther” on stage in Detroit. Of course, he can also continue doing exactly what he is doing and make millions of dollars and keep millions of admirers happy. But it doesn’t seem to make him very happy.

Only the loudest screams at the end drew a hint of a smile.

* Andrea Bocelli appears at the Hollywood Bowl on April 24, (213) 480-3232.