Frangoulis, follow your art

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Review: Frangoulis, follow your art

'Follow Your Heart' aches for better material

By Porter Anderson

CNN

Thursday, March 3, 2005 Posted: 2050 GMT (0450 HKT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/03/frangoulis.cd/index.html

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Greek tenor Mario Frangoulis has a serious shot at the niche currently dominated by American Josh Groban.

Frangoulis is sharper-looking than Groban; younger by a decade than Italian Andrea Bocelli; and better-credentialed than England's Russell Watson.

And can he sing his way to that mountaintop? Yes. But even a voice as supple as his -- capable of bravura bombast and baklava-honeyed tenderness -- needs good music.

Born in Zimbabwe and raised by the Hellenic side of his family, Frangoulis has spent enough time in stage-meister Cameron Mackintosh's costumes to know his way around a song. In the West End, he played Marius in "Les Miserables" -- the "Empty Chairs, Empty Tables" role -- and Raoul in "The Phantom of the Opera." He studied acting at London's Guildhall. He won the Maria Callas Prize as a singer.

And yet, what star rises without help? Frangoulis needs some.

Buddy, can you spare a song?

Groban, Frangoulis' chief competitor in the U.S. marketplace, is produced by David Foster, the industry fixture behind some great moments for Celine Dion, Peter Cetera, Natalie Cole, Michael Bublι.

Frangoulis' producer on his new "Follow Your Heart" CD is Emanuele Ruffinengo, who seems determined to squander this talent on the same feckless, drill-bore sentiment that made Whitney Houston such a terror in the 1992 Black & Decker solo "I Will Always Love You."

Frangoulis' CD opener "Come What May," for example, was hardly the best thing about the film "Moulin Rouge." At least 80 percent of its lyric content is repetitions of the line "I will love you until my dying day."

What a difference you hear when Frangoulis switches into a worried, meditative study based on the adagio from an oboe concerto attributed to Alessandro Marcello (1684-1750).

The CD's title ditty has all the nourishment of shopping-mall pop, especially when a way-too-wholesome choir kicks in on the refrain.

But that disaster is forgotten as soon as Frangoulis teams up with Alejandro Fernandez in the Miguel Bosθ-worthy darkness of "Hay Mas."

The patterns of success and failure here are easy to discern.

When Ruffinengo seats Frangoulis' voice in its rightful, panoramic context of European-Mediterranean sonics, the singer is self-assured. You bask in the glistening dynamics and tonal control he brings to his vocals. But when he's abandoned to so banal a mess as "Here's to the Heroes," Frangoulis is wasted, his stunning range and gorgeously practiced glissandi dumped into a vague anthem that would embarrass a junior-high patriotic rally.

When is he best? When he sings with Spain's gutsy popster Melody the Martini-Morolo marvel, "Cu'mme." Not only are Ruffinengo's orchestration and the singers' leads sleek and sexy, but the lyrics, if you get hold of a translation, are worth singing: "Come down with me into the deep sea / To find what we don't have here anymore / Come with me and start to understand / How useless it is to keep on suffering."

Melody's intuitive sass perfectly answers Frangoulis' most cosmopolitan mode. And this track's plucky, flash-point rhythm is the beat likeliest to make the comparatively brooding Josh Groban nervous.

The ready solution

Which brings us to another Josh. Joshua Bell, the violin virtuoso who plays with Groban on his CD "Closer," has said that he wants to write music that gets him closer to a popular idiom. Frangoulis has exactly the crossover promise that Bell's genius can support.

Would someone please get this Athenian and that Stradivarian together? They're brother Sony artists, after all, each a huge talent.

Frangoulis deserves better than "Follow Your Heart." And we can only benefit from a chance to follow his art.