TIME TO SAY TENORE

"INTERNATIONAL success has offered little to distract Andrea from his love for the simple Tuscan life, where he has recently built new stone farmhomes for both himself and his family, close to the original family farm. It is here that Andrea returns to his home, perhaps to indulge in that only other great passion of his life. Saddling up on one of his stable of six Arabian horses to gallop wild and gracefully across the Tuscan country-side or through the surf, Andrea becomes a free spirit, graceful and wild like the voice which has blown across Europe like a warm wind from the Mediterranean."

Can you blame Andrea Bocelli for being touchy? Fanned by press releases like this, his voice is blowing less like a warm wind and more like Hurricane Charlie across the charts of Europe. The minute he allows a chink to form in the PR full metal jacket he has worn for the last couple of weeks on the grounds of "exhaustion", he gets breathy Irish journalists like this one basically begging him to be what his voice promises. And he isn't. He is a calm, educated, intelligent opera singer who has allowed his beautiful voice to feature on a pop album, Romanza, in the hope of giving his operatic career a push.

"Personally, I like opera more than anything else," he says, speaking in Italian. He admonishes me that he doesn't have to return to opera - he's always in the middle of it. "However, every now and then I like to sing songs - partly because I have lots of friends who don't like opera. And I do it gladly. Also because, objectively speaking, it's a good way of making people curious and attracting them to the theatre."

His duet with Sarah Brightman, Time To Say Goodbye, has just been dislodged from Number One in the singles charts by Hanson.

Romanza has sold over five million copies in Europe, is Number Four in Ireland, and has been Number One in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria. It's an overpoweringly lush sequence of soaring vocals, gorgeous harmonies, full-throttle orchestration, and beautiful, romantic lyrics. Powerful emotions are expressed, exquisitely, in a language which obliges with very easy rhyming and translates badly.

But you sense, after talking to Bocelli for a few minutes there is going to be no point asking him what he thinks of when he trills: "Il mare calmo della sera". The one song he wrote himself rings more true to him: "I want to stay like this/If possible to the end/By now the world around/No longer interests me./It is enough that you are here/and I hold you like this./A gesture from you is enough/a smile,/a word;/and a moment like this/is worth an eternity./Light, a fire and then/let's be alone!/Us.

He only gets back to that stone house in Tuscany every to days, and it's not just those horses he misses: he misses his wife, who is pregnant, and their son. Asked if his international success has made him happy, he pauses and then says: "Every medal has a reverse side, as we say in Italian. I am happy, but there are also problems without end."

The easy cohabitation of popular Italian song with opera which I had imagined, is dismissed by Bocelli. Folk song doesn't interest him at all, he says, apart from Neapolitan song, which features on the album in E Chiove: "Neapolitan song has always been part of the Italian tenor's repertoire, always. Caruso began to sing Neapolitan songs, then Gigli did them, they all did them, the great Italian tenors."

It is obvious that this is the only class to which he aspires: "The division between opera and popular song is there, and must always be there. Opera is part of cultured music. And this has rules which are stable and precise. Song does not have rules which are stable and precise, it is based on other concepts - improvisation, imagination. For that reason, boundaries there must be, and there always will be.

He does not agree that the Italian language lends itself particularly well to romantic song - but rather to songs which are sung in a projected timbre: "It's not for nothing that opera was born in Italy between 1500 and 1600." The dominion over Italy of songs in English is waning, he says: "The real reason English songs were more powerful in the 1960s and 1970s is that the multinational record companies were all English or American. Once the Italian companies became part of the multi-nationals, then Italian singers had the right structures for world-wide exposure.

He doesn't bow to the power of English, which has kept singers of Bob Dylan-like stature such as Francesco de Gregori, Pino Daniele and Lorenzo Dalla in complete obscurity in the English-speaking world, and cites obvious exceptions such as Zucchero and Pavarotti. Both of these have had an enormous influence on his life. The chapter headed "The Discovery in the press pack goes like this: "Bocelli gave up working as a barrister to make a go of singing. He was plucked from the ranks of the piano bar performers by Zucchero, when he held auditions for tenors to make a demo tape of the duet, Miserere, co-written with Bono, in an attempt to persuade Pavarotti to record the song."

Zucchero's response is recorded thus: "Andrea was just unbelievable! He had something not one of the other tenors possessed. He had soul". When Pavarotti got the demo, he is reported to have exclaimed (and I quote): "Zucchero! Who is this guy? Thank you for writing such a wonderful song.

Yet you do not need me to sing it - let Andrea sing Miserere with you. for there is no one finer!" The same Pavarotti went on to record the song himself, but Bocelli went on tour with Zucchero, and was signed to the Milan-based Sugar records (which has a deal with Polygram) when he sang Miserere and Nessun Dorma at Zucchero's birthday party.

Pavarotti invited Boccelli to sing at his annual televised party in Modena, Pavarotti and Friends, and - more importantly - asked him to spend a week at his house first, working on his voice. The opera critic of the London Independent was quoted a couple of weeks ago as saying he could be mistaken for the jumbo tenor: "He has exactly the same squillo quality, which is a silver, trumpet-like tone". He certainly impressed the same newspaper's Nick Kimberley when he sang with Kiri Te Kanawa at Hampton Court two weeks ago.

"Amplification makes it difficult to tell, but it seemed a loud voice, willing to indulge in the merest hint of a sob, although not blatant. There is a hint of toughness, but as it swelled on Che gelida manina from La boheme, we felt the thrill of an authentically Italian tenor let loose

This is a real voice, despite some rough gear changes between chest and head voice. When Te Kanawa joined him for O Soave Faneiulla (Boheme again), there was that pricking behind the eyes as the tear ducts responded."

BOCELLI's operatic career is hampered, however, by the fact that he was blinded by a football accident when he was 12. He is obviously irritated by the Peters and Lee-type attention being paid to his handicap, saying: "Everyone has problems to overcome. The important thing is to overcome them, and not to create more of them for yourself." When asked has his blindness increased his love of music, he responds: "Absolutely not. You're born with a voice. You discover it naturally. If you have a voice, sooner or later you're going to sing."

Next year he will sing in La boheme in Italy. When I say I'd like to go, he promises to send me an invitation, but then adds that he'll give it to me when he does a concert in Ireland (calm down, there are no confirmed plans). "I am glad to have been successful in Ireland, because although I have never been there, I know it's very green and the people are very gentile (nice, kind, civilised - good man, Andrea)."

You're not going to be sobbing with your fella to the strains of Time To Say Goodbye, however, because Bocelli never sings songs live, just arias. He is surviving by holding on to this artistic control in the face of his success, which surprised him: "Of course I was surprised. Anyone who is successful is surprised. Success does not have rules". And it seems he doesn't much care what nonsense is spoken in his name as long as his artistic world is unassailed: "You must allow people to believe what they want. You must never expect people to think what you want them to think of you. The important thing for me is to be myself. I always say who I am, and what I think. That done, the people can think what they like."