Sarah Brightman has sold eight million albums worldwide. In the US she is the top UK touring artist ahead of Sting, Eric Clapton and The Spice Girls. You can't argue with statistics like that mate!
So what makes her mix of classical, opera, chill-out style ambience and contemporary pop so ruddy dull? Could it be the strut and bluster of the hugely overblown production? The vast swathes of strings, the rows and rows of choir singers, the layers of synths? The lyrics in a handful of languages? There's no subtlety here, no space to breathe. Brightman is so keen to show how versatile she is, and how great music is great music no matter what genre it comes from, that she runs around covering all the basses, spinning plates without a pause.
And in the end she just sounds like Enya, fronting Enigma covering other people's songs. A horrible thought. Bomb The Bass's 'Winter In July' just about survives the treatment. The traditional 'Scarborough Fair' sounds pretty much as it did when Simon & Garfunkel left it, and Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' could have done without the big West End musical style finish.
No doubt Brightman has a technically capable voice. But it doesn't have feeling, it doesn't involve you in any way. Cases in point are her cover of Dido's 'Here With Me' and hidden track 'Moon River'. They don't have large, showy voices like Brightman but both Dido and Audrey Hepburn respectively manage to pluck the heart-strings while she can barely reach them.
Beethoven, Morricone and Dvorak are all touched by Brightman's classical-crossover magic wand but to no avail. You'll never listen to this album more than once. To think this woman melted many a school boy's heart in 1978 with the raunchy disco of 'I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper'. Sad.
