Why does Bocelli receive bad reviews but is so successful?

 

Andrea Bocelli

Andrea Bocelli is one of the most successful recording artists of today. His CD recordings sell by the million and he plays to packed audiences. But can this blind Italian man really sing?

I'm not a music critic, but when I first heard Andrea Bocelli sing, I thought he sounded bloody awful and I've never changed my view on that. He's certainly not up to operatic standards in my view. I didn't care much for the Salford tenor, Russell Watson, but of the two, he's potentially a far better singer than Bocelli, but commercially less successful. Compare Bocelli to singers like Placido Domingo, Joseph Calleja, Franco Corelli, Guiseppi Di Stefano, Beniamino Gigli, or even Mario Lanza, and you can tell how inferior his voice is.

In this 2006 review, by the music critic Bernard Holland, he says that Bocelli "sings mostly in tune..." and he writes: "The critics duty is to report that Mr Bocelli is not a very good singer. The tone is rasping, thin and, in general, poorly supported. Even the most modest upward movement thins it even more, signalling what appears to be the onset of strangulation."

So what does this tell us about the musical tastes or lack of it, of the millions of people who buy Bocelli's CD's, and who attend his concerts, and rate him as a good singer? Are they just a bunch of Classic FM cultural Philistines with bad taste?

By all accounts, the great Italian tenor, Franco Corelli, praised Bocelli's voice when he first heard it in a master class in Turin in 1986, and he gave Bocelli private singing lessons. Yet, Holland says, that studio recordings can be enhanced and blemishes minimized and that even though it's a risky business putting Bocelli in front of a full orchestra unamplified, there is something beyond music that draws people to Andrea Bocelli, and that is talent in itself.

Perhaps, it's Mr Bocelli's personality rather than his singing that's the key to his success. In 1998, Bocelli was named one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People. Yet, some do question, if he would have been as successful, if he hadn't have been a blind singer. Born with visual impairment and totally blind since the age of 12, Mr Bocelli is to be greatly admired for how he's overcome adversity and his disability to establish a successful recording career in music. Good luck to him.