'I'M MARCO,' says the man who greets me in the lobby of Kowloon's InterContinental Grand Stanford hotel. 'I'm his agent.' Marco Bianchi, president of Form Art entertainment agency, is referring to Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, in Hong Kong as part of his Spring 2004 Asian tour, also taking in Manila and Singapore.
'No questions about his wife - he's divorcing,' Bianchi says, reading my list of questions and crossing off two. 'And don't ask him how he became blind - it upsets him.'
Bocelli is performing tonight at 8pm at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. (The Manila concert took place on April 30, and the final stop, Singapore, is on Monday.) Until Bianchi appeared, it was hard to tell who, if anyone, was handling Bocelli's media interviews. He's one of the world's most famous singers, but there's a surprising lack of pomp and organisation surrounding his appearance here.
Bocelli has produced 13 pop, opera and classical albums that have sold more than 50 million copies, making him one of the best-selling classical/pop music performers of all time. His pop best-seller, Romanza (1996), featuring a duet with another crossover singer, Sarah Brightman, catapulted him to stardom. That album, alone, has sold more than 15 million copies. His opera CDs sell an average of 100,000 copies each - stellar for opera, but not in the same league as his classical and pop albums. The as-yet-unnamed follow-up to his last classical CD, Sentimento (2002), should be released this September, Bocelli says.
Along with the recordings and the 10 to 30 concerts he normally does a year, he has also headlined dozens of live opera performances, mainly in Italy. This July, he'll play Cavaradossi in a production of Tosca in Torre del Lago.
Bianchi says Bocelli contracted glaucoma at six and, as the disease progressed, completely lost his vision at 12, but most published reports (including Form Art's own press materials) attribute his blindness to both glaucoma and an accident during a soccer match when he was a child.