Andrew Sullivan links this clip from Britain’s equivalent of American Idol (with Simon Cowell and everything!) of a cell phone salesman belting out (bits of) “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. On the one hand, I’m delighted to see someone can get a standing ovation singing opera on a show like this, and never in a million years could I do a tenth as good a job as this guy did. Try it: This is incredibly hard stuff to sing well.
On the other hand—and in full recognition that I sound like an awful wet-blanket snob here—I wonder if the novel choice of material didn’t skew the evaluation of the crowd and the judges alike. His phrasing and inflection are awfully flat and mechanical in a piece that gives you a lot of room to work with. Also, I know they’ve got time limits on these, but what he’s singing is a kind of chopped up remix of an aria that isn’t all that long to begin with. So his voice ought to be pretty well-rested when he gets to the climactic vinceros, but you can definitely hear him reaching on the final two, which (at least on a first pass) it sounds like he hits slightly flat. That still makes him a fantastically gifted amateur, and I hope he does well in the competition, but I’m not convinced we’ve discovered a pro-level operatic star either.
6 responses so far ↓
1 LP // Jun 14, 2007 at 4:41 pm
What an odd song choice, if this show is focused on pop music as American Idol is.
Aside from opera being ‘incredibly hard stuff to sing well,’ it’s also terrifying to try to do so in front of any audience at all, let alone a large one. Terror, of course, makes you tremble, which in turn makes it darned hard to hit pitches accurately. So perhaps he’s a pro-level operatic star, with stage fright.
2 Anthony C // Jun 14, 2007 at 8:48 pm
It’s not the British equivalent of “American Idol” (though we do have one). It’s “Britain’s Got Talent” which I think is meant to be rather like an updated version of on old-school talent show where people can do pretty much anything they fancy so long as it’s entertaining. The focus isn’t specifically on pop music.
At the risk of also sounding snobby, if you’re going to do opera, Nessun Dorma’s the bit to do – everyone in the UK is familiar with it and I don’t actually think it was a particularly exceptional performance, though it was far from bad.
This is always assuming that the earlier comment about stage fright isn’t correct and stage fright does seem a plausible possibility.
3 Jon // Jun 18, 2007 at 12:47 am
Agreed – Pavarotti he certainly ain’t. But to choose arguably the most familiar aria in all of opera was a ballsy move from a critical standpoint.
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