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Newsweek
International |
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The
Preteen Diva |
Charlotte
Church, age 13, is a classical hit
On a midwinter night at an 18th-century Roman palazzo, the marble-floored and chandeliered room is abuzz with
anticipation for the performance ahead. Editors from French women's magazines mingle with bearded musicologists, and suited executives
chat with Japanese television crews. There's a hush when the host, Rome's
British ambassador, delivers a speech. But silence falls when a little girl
gets
up, gives a giggly intro?replete with "ums," and "OKs"?and
then begins to sing. Listening to this slip of a blue-eyed thing belt out
"Amazing Grace" stretches credulity. Her voice has neither piping
innocence, nor
the full-throated control of an adult soprano, but a surprisingly
rich and precocious tone.
Charlotte
Church is just 13 and a budding classical music star. Most divas don't ask that trips to Disney World be
included in their recording contracts, but then Charlotte Church is rather
unusual. Her album of hymns and folk songs, "Voice of an
Angel," climbed to No. 1 in Britain's classical charts and reached the top 10 in the pop
charts after its release last fall. It went double-platinum in five weeks, making
it a merry
Christmas indeed for Sony, which signed Church for a reported £100,000
advance on a five-album contract last spring. She sang for the pope's Christmas concert and Prince Charles's birthday party. She's
met George Michael, posed in heels and furs for magazines and is being promoted
as the biggest thing to hit classical music since Pavarotti. Says her
mother, 32-year-old Maria Church, who quit her job in a Cardiff
public-housing office to help manage her daughter's career: "I know how the
Spice Girls's
mothers feel."
Raised in a close-knit Welsh Catholic family, Charlotte Church began singing in church benefits and karaoke
competitions at the age of 3. When a television show asked talented kids to
audition, Church called and sang a few lines from Andrew Lloyd Webber's
"Requiem" over the phone. An agent snapped her up. At 11, she begged her voice
coach, Louise Ryan, to teach her to sing like a grown-up. Ryan
laughed it off: nobody can produce an operatic sound until they're grown, she
told Church. But Charlotte insisted, so Ryan showed her how to
breathe and project properly. Most child singers produce "white
sound"?glass-clear notes that sound pretty in choirs but dull
in solos. Charlotte's voice resembles a scaled-down diva's: she rounds her
sound, injecting color to enhance phrasing or meanings. "Her voice is a mix
between a child's and an adult's," says Jeremy Colton, executive producer
of the Sony album. Purists say Charlotte's singing isn't so much a
subtle blend as it is the sound of a kid straining at notes she's too young
to hit squarely. "A couple of the opera critics really slagged her
off," admits Maria Church. "But that's disrespectful." So there's a good deal
of hurry-up-and-wait when it comes to Charlotte Church. Voice experts
debate whether she'll end up a soprano or contralto, and speculate on whether it
will
deliver on its enormous promise. At the back of skeptics' minds are the specters of earlier child singers: the Welsh boy soprano who had
platinum records in the '80s?until his voice changed, and the
Scots's
prodigy who sank from stardom into eating disorders and
has-been-hood.
It's clear
that Charlotte's been
schooled in the quicksilver nature of fame. She'll recite the cautionary tale of her aunt, a cabaret
singer without a national hit. She'll tell you of her grandfather, whose
band sang for an Israeli prime minister and "who almost made it, but didn't
quite get there." When Church went with her manager and mother to talk about a
contract with a dozen Sony executives, she went with a list of questions
about her future. "What happens if, when I'm 15, I want to dye my
hair purple and get tattoos?" she asked. The answer: "We'll just have
to turn you into Alanis Morissette."
When she grows
up, Charlotte wants to sing Tosca and Madama Butterfly at La Scala
in Milan. For now, much of her life seems disarmingly normal. She
goes to a Cardiff school, photocopying missed work when concerts
keep her out of classes. She has a pet lizard named Iggie, plays games like Heretic and Blood on her computer and has
singing lessons for two hours on Sunday afternoons. Get her chatting, and
you see
that she's hard-wired for performance. She does a mean impression of
Jerry Springer guests?"Don't even go there, girl." There's
scarcely a beat between an account of the joys of the PlayStation that Sony
gave
her for Christmas, and of getting blessed by the pope: "He made
a huuuuuge sign of the cross."
Last month Charlotte visited the United States to do critics' showcases before the release of "Voice of an
Angel" in March. For Charlotte, America means burgers, "Frasier" and Puff
Daddy. For
Sony, it means the mother of all markets. The Italians love
Charlotte's Catholicism and her close-knit family. The Japanese are keen on the
novelty of a tiny girl with a huge voice. The British are proud that
she was
homegrown in Wales. But America remains the great frontier, one that
Maria Church admits makes her "apprehensive." Yet William Morris
has just signed her, and her agent says there's interest from Hollywood. What's
more, says her mother, if anything goes wrong, "she's got a damn good
lawyer."
And? for now anyway? a damn good voice.
By Carla Power
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