'I have a confession to make," says the 39-year-old Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, through his interpreter. "I'm not really a tenor at all; that voice for me isn't so natural. When I am alone, I sing in baritone, I don't have to get the high notes that way."
Significant but hardly career-threatening news from the likeable, if a tad intense, man whose new album, Tuscan Skies, is currently keeping Michael Jackson and other popsters off the top of the album charts. "Ah yes, the crossover market," he says, smiling.
He might make classical fundamentalists gag every time he opens his mouth to sing Time To Say Goodbye, but Bocelli remains defiant.
"The way some people see things, you have to be constantly compared to someone extraordinary like Gigli, but I don't see it as a competition," he says. "I'm only trying to emulate those great voices I grew up listening to in Tuscany. People think that it's something to do with the technique of a voice, but I understand the term 'technique' the way the ancient Greeks did, that it's a mixture of technicity - if that is a word - and art. In other words, don't separate the singer from the person; the singer is the result of the person. Classical/pop or pop/classical, it's not important to me what it's called. I never really concern myself with the differences; it's only what other people say and write. My passion is for opera, but the advantage of me doing 'popular' music is that maybe I can take people with me to the classical repertoire - so yes, in that sense it's being kept alive."
Bocelli knows of what he speaks. His commercial blockbusting mix of arias, traditional Italian song and pop balladry swerves effortlessly between genres. In the classical vein, the albums Viaggio Italiano and Aria established his name, but it was on the pop albums Romanza and Sogno that his sales figures shot up from three million (for Aria) to superstar levels of 16 million (Romanza).
"For me, though, it is much easier to record a classical album" he says. "I know exactly what I have to do. With a pop album, the mood is completely different.
"Either way, though, you have to treat your voice like an athlete treats his or her body - you just can't come out of nowhere to break the record for the 100 metres, you have to work up to it. I still have to work on my high notes on a daily level - they are too thin. Every day I work with an American coach on the muscles of my larynx."
The man who trained to be a lawyer and for a long while in his 20s sang in a bar as a part-time job, has been blind since the age of 12. He hates being called a "blind singer" and says he's so tired answering questions about it that he's thinking of asking his manager to forbid anybody ever asking him about it again. He was born with a congenital bilateral glaucoma, but only fully lost his sight 12 years later.
Rather bizarrely, he would have continued as a lawyer if it hadn't have been for Bono - sort of. Back at the time when Bocelli was still singing Nessun Dorma in a bar for tips, the Italian pop star, Zucchero, was making a demo of a song he co-wrote with Bono called Miserere.
Zucchero wanted Pavarotti to sing on the single and asked Bocelli to put down his voice as a guide vocal so that Pavarotti would have some idea of what was required of him when he got the demo.
"The story is famous now," says Bocelli. "Apparently, when Pavarotti received the tape and heard my guide vocal, he rang Zucchero and said: 'Who is this guy? You don't need me singing on this song, let this new guy do it.' I've been friends with Pavarotti since. I spent a week in his house recently."
While adamant that he wants to return to his first love, the operatic canon, he says this new "pop" album was a joy to do, inspired as it was by the place where he was born and still lives with his wife and two children - Tuscany.
There's certainly no easing up on the voice on this "pop" collection - listen to him soar and swoop all over the turbulent Il Diavolo E L'Angelo and check out his dark and sensuous lower range on Se La Gente Usasse Il Cuore. And who's that reciting a Bocelli poem over the introduction to L'Incontro? "That's Signor Bono" says Bocelli, "not bad, is it?"
'I am diluting classical music and it probably turns their stomach," Welsh teenager Charlotte Church says in reply to her critics. Another pop-classical phenomenon, Church may only be 15, but she certainly knows her way around musical criticism and representation.
"I know my voice isn't the best in the world. I don't pretend to be able to sing a song as well as somebody 20 years older than me, but all I can do is sing them the way I sing them. What people who criticise me for 'diluting' don't realise is that myself and Andrea Bocelli are keeping classical music alive. It's just been getting deader and deader. Maybe we are like little poppy classical people, making it a bit more contemporised. But they should at least realise "Hello! We're trying to help it" and attracting loads of people towards classical music - maybe not in the way the purists want, but there you go."
Over the course of three albums in the past three years - Voice of An Angel, Charlotte Church and Dream A Dream - she has sold more than 10 million records and performed in front of "well, let's see - there was the Pope, Bill Clinton, the Queen".
She also sang recently for George W. Bush. "He was talking to me afterwards and he said, 'Where are you from?' I said Wales and he said, 'What state is that in?' "
If Church is indeed a child star freak, she does a good job of disguising it. Managed by her parents, she complains that she's only given £20 a week pocket money ("if I need make-up for performing, I can get some extra money for that") and says that all the money she's made has been put into a trust fund she can't get at until she's 21.
"I do have a normal life," she insists. "I still go to school back in Wales except when I'm on tour, when I have tutors. I'm well aware that some people might think my existence is freakish, but apart from giving up a certain amount of personal privacy and getting some very strange fan letters - although they don't show me the obsessive ones - I'm a normal 15-year-old girl who likes to listen to hip-hop and rock music, who expects to rebel at some stage and who would like to go to university.
"The only real difference here is that when it comes to boyfriends and having my first drink, there's going to be stories in the paper about it, but what can you do?"
Discovered on a television talent show when she was just 11, Church approached the "serious lite" repertoire with a vengeance and projected an image that definitely didn't allow for any Destiny's Child-style bare midriff.
"I wouldn't want to be as famous as them," says Church of her r 'n' b contemporaries. "Or as famous as Britney Spears or Celine Dion. I want to be able to walk down the street, to experiment with different types of music. I'm not sure if the people who buy my records will stay with me if I go for a radically different approach, but maybe in some sense it's not just the music they're involved in. They've watched me grow up."
Although a child prodigy, she insists there was no hot-housing going on when she was younger. "I'm from a very normal working-class Welsh background. I used to sing with my cousins at family lunches. It wasn't until I went on television and sang Pie Jesu that things began to change," she says.
On her new album, Enchantment, she tackles songs such as Eric Satie's marvellous Gymnopedies, Somewhere and Tonight from West Side Story, and Carrickfergus.
Both Van Morrison and Bryan Ferry have had stabs at the latter, what can a 15-year-old bring to it that they couldn't?
"I know I don't have the life experience to sing a lot of these songs as if I can totally empathise with the lyrics," Church says. "I do, though, try to get to the emotional core of each of the songs. I approach it like you would approach a poem, that you have to voice someone else's work as a type of narrator. That's the way it works for me. I listen to someone like Jeff Buckley and he just inhabits those songs so well. It's a question of life experience for me and, as I get older, I hope that I can narrate better."
After a well-publicised sacking of her first manager - "it was a stressful, vindictive and nasty time" - she's now signed up to the William Morris agency, but is wary of any cross-media plans for her.
"There's talk of some acting, of a 'world music' album, but I'm really not sure," she says. "This is my job, this is my career now and I am in full control of it. Generally, the people who work with me have been good and I haven't been over-commercialised. You know, though, if anything, I am the one who wants to move quickly, everyone around me wants to slow things down."
As one of the world's top-grossing female "classical" vocalists, Church takes extreme pleasure in the fact that she could walk away from it all tomorrow. "Yeh, I could go and work in a video shop or join the Hare Krishnas if I wanted to," she says.
"I'm only contracted to do certain things until I'm 18. I do realise that I have to move on and experiment. I don't want to do a Celine Dion-ish album. The next thing I do will be something out of the ordinary."
Tuscan Skies by Andrea Bocelli is on Polydor.
Enchantment by Charlotte Church is on Sony