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SO, WHAT can we expect when the four-member operatic boy band Il
Divo plays its two sold-out concerts at QPAC on Monday and Tuesday?
"The concert was a schlocky, cloying and highly contrived display
with an unvaried sound and stage act that could make any music-lover
turn away in embarrassment," sneered The Washington Post reviewer
after a performance in the US capital last month.
But try telling that to the capacity audience who gave the very
same gig a standing ovation, and in particular to one of them who
threw her purple G-string on stage.
What charms the pants off one person is not necessarily the stuff
of musical excellence.
And therein lies the inherent contradiction of operatic pop.
Blame it on The Three Tenors, who at the 1990 Soccer World Cup cashed
in their artistic chips to form the most improbable boy band yet.
With their repertoire of operatic blockbusters and popular classics
topping the charts, a new commercial genre was born.
Now, as the ageing Luciano Pavarotti, Placido
Domingo and Jose Carreras fade from the scene, a new generation
of slicker, slimmer and often louder vocalists is taking their
place at the top of the so-called "classical" charts.
They're led by Andrea Bocelli, with his heart-rending vulnerability
and woeful vocal technique, while others including Russell Watson,
Josh Groban, Hayley Westenra and Mario Frangoulis sound like opera
singers, but their repertoire, marketing and stage presentation comes
straight out of middle-of-the-road pop.
Opera now even has its equivalents of the Backstreet Boys and Spice
Girls, with vocal groups like Amici Forever, who played QPAC last
month, and the Opera Babes oozing sex appeal while massacring the
classics.
And now, when shame has been left far behind, there's Il Divo, four
attractive young men handpicked by entrepreneurial guru Simon Cowell
to take operatic boy bands to a new level of commercial success.
And judging by the five million-plus sales of their first two albums,
the ability of the multilingual quartet to make women remove their
underwear is second only to their skill in shaking cash out of their
wallets.
In some weeks they've been shifting 150,000 CDs.
It's a stereotypical foreign affair, with
the "band" consisting
of American tenor David Miller, French pop heartthrob Sebastien Izambard,
Spanish baritone Carlos Marin and the flowing-locked Swiss tenor
Urs Buhler.
The repertoire includes Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart,
a vocal version of Ennio Morricone's theme from The Mission,
plus the obligatory Feelings – the latter a particularly
popular addition seeing as its sentimentality has found it banned
in some late-night cocktail bars.
Well may we mock, but based on his experience as the Svengali behind
boy bands like Five and Westlife, Cowell clearly knows his job.
Indeed, long before he became the nasty judge on American Idol,
the Englishman's production company was involved in the World Wrestling
Entertainment spectaculars, wherein the noble, ancient sport is transformed
into a stadium spectacle of raw emotion, hysteria and melodrama.
Part-Springer show, part-Vegas choreography, the WWE extravaganza
is all about emotion overwhelming rationality.
Cowell's entertainment motto seems to be that life is meant to be
cheesy. His Idol phenomena (Pop Idol in Britain, American
Idol) in particular have tugged at heartstrings and generated
audience fanaticism far in excess of the actual talent on offer.
"The Cowell principle" has little
to do with the original artform. It's about making it over into
entertainment.
And Cowell is now doing for opera what he did for wrestling in WWE
and the eisteddfod in Idol. With his four cliched frontmen
singing in the languages of love, Il Divo pushes the traditional
operatic gestures into the realm of pure passion, transcending the
need for any specialist knowledge and instantly engaging with the
emotions.
Never mind the outrageous roughness of some of the vocalising. It's
all about the show, the bonhomie, the charm offensive and giving
the punters what they want.
After two years of searching for the artists, followed by months
of rehearsals in London during 2004, Il Divo was unleashed on the
world as something like the love children of The Three Tenors, except
you can't imagine any of these blokes singing a lead role at the
Met.
Their demographic is the audience that in previous eras went nuts
for Julio Iglesias, Tom Jones and Fabio.
All this, of course, makes the classical concert organisations tear
their hair out in frustration.
The fact is that after decades of the phenomenon, it's clear that
audiences attracted to these commercial presentations of the classics
very rarely cross over into the mainstream concert hall.
Just as WWE fans don't usually go to their local PCYC to watch real
wrestlers ply their trade, so too you're unlikely to find Il Divo's
audience backing up for The Queensland Orchestra's performance of
the Mahler Second Symphony later in the year.
And that's why it's pointless to discuss Il Divo and their countless
chart-topping colleagues from the standpoint of traditional criticism.
When the sideshow's in town, there's no point in sending the filet
mignon expert to review the brightly coloured, sugary fairy-floss.
It's all about the gorging punters and the sales volume.
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