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Rating: Strange to say, but my first full listen to this album is recent history, in fact, the story of these days. And to think that the first album I bought was "The Very Best of Freddie Mercury Solo," released in 2005 and accompanied by a massive media promotion. A collection in which "Barcelona" is represented by four songs (title track, The Golden Boy, How Can I Go On, Guide me Home), four out of seven actual songs on the list. Yet, during my personal Queen-mania, I completely overlooked this bizarre side project of Freddie, partly because of my prejudices at the time, partly because the only one of those songs that I really liked was "The Golden Boy"; I even considered "Barcelona" just slightly better than "Who Wants to Live Forever", meaning lots of special effects and little substance, and I was wrong, at least partially. But let's proceed in order.
The general rule remains that pop and opera are better kept well separated, it's pointless to list all the monstrosities resulting from the crossover of these two worlds, the repulsive visual imagery, the even more repellent "Nessun Dorma" and various trashy media stunts. The point is that "Barcelona" is an exception, not the rule, unfortunately and/or fortunately. Anyway, I did well to approach this short but exquisite album full of interesting ideas only now. Now that I have a direct and circumstantial knowledge of opera music, now that I actually know who Montserrat Caballé was. So who was Montserrat Caballé? Let's say she was the most complete, if not the best interpreter of Italian opera of her generation, especially concerning the more "noble" roles of the bel canto and Verdi repertoire, from Norma and the Queens of Donizetti to Leonora in Il Trovatore and Elisabeth of Valois in Don Carlos. But above all, she was a full lyric soprano, powerful, expressive, and endowed with an unmistakable timbre, the first and indispensable requirement for a diva of first magnitude. The queen of pianissimo, they called her, just as Renata Tebaldi went down in history as the voice of an angel. Nicknames deserved in both cases, but in both cases quite misleading. Montse was a complete performer, with dramatic power at will as well as sweet, fluttering high notes; characteristics that allowed her to portray an atypical but very convincing Salome of Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde, setting her apart from all the lyric sopranos specialized in the Italian repertoire of her contemporaries. In short, just as much as Freddie (on whom I don't think it's appropriate to dwell too much) was an absolute excellence in his field, Montse was in hers.
All right, but the union of two excellences does not necessarily result in an excellence, you might say, rightly so. And here we come to what distinguishes "Barcelona" from seemingly similar operations: this is not an album of Queen songs with a randomly placed orchestra and soprano, nor is it of operatic arias bastardized into pop form; no, it is a serious and ambitious project, well studied, and especially with tailored new tracks. Now, the title track: the first two instrumental minutes are a "prelude" of great impact, and that arena-rock taste crescendo, decidedly not my cup of tea, fits into the context of the era, of what Queen was producing at that time. No, I never felt it was mine, "Barcelona", but now I can appreciate it for what it is, and recognize its value.
But the album has better to offer, starting with "Guide Me Home" and "How Can I Go On", the less ambitious episodes of the album but both perfectly successful instant classics, with melodies that happily wink at certain '60s radio pop, adding "steroids" but without exaggerating, and two voices that complete each other perfectly. By the way, it must be said that, if Freddie always sings and anyway, well... like Freddie, Caballé in 1988 was in the declining phase of her career, perhaps due to some rather daring repertoire choices like Turandot, Gioconda and Medea (she remained a lyric soprano, after all), but here she magnificently holds the stage even with a little bit of gas, simply exploiting the beauty of her voice. Not that she is required to make any significant vocal exertion, at least for someone like her, but beauty and personality cannot be faked, and Montserrat proves it even in such a context, as a "guest".
I've already talked about "The Golden Boy", and to find a song of equal creativity and ambition in the Queen repertoire one has to go back to "Bohemian Rhapsody," which I do not mention by chance: the atmospheres of THOSE Queen, period '73-76, resurface in "Barcelona", even if in a different form: in "La Japonaise" and "The Fallen Priest", especially, also theatrical, full of color and pathos, at the same time neoclassical and timeless, in short, typical pieces in the best Queen style and, by the way, does the fact Freddie reappears on the cover without a mustache have anything to do with it? In any case, these two stand tall even without special effects, "Ensueno" is there to prove it: it is the only song where Caballé was directly involved in the creative process, and also the only one without high notes and without orchestration. Freddie and Montse remain in the full, seductive low register of their voices, languidly conversing accompanied by the piano and nothing else.
A slightly off note is the concluding "Overture Piccante", neither overture nor spicy but simply a collage of all the other songs on the album, decidedly redundant and self-indulgent. Closing with a flourish with "How Can I Go On" would have been definitely better, but it's still fine. "Barcelona", in its being slightly bombastic, in its paying homage to the ethos of its times, sounds much more genuinely Queen than mishmashes that don't hold together, with dizzying discrepancies at stylistic and especially qualitative levels like "The Game", "The Works" or "The Miracle". Here there is uniformity and an idea at the base, a glue that makes "Barcelona" an album and not a mere string of songs. This glue is called Montserrat Caballé, it's called Popera, if you like, and it holds together arena rock and gospel, soul and old-style radio pop, crooning and sing-a-long choruses full of pathos. May the Gods keep them in glory, Freddie and Montserrat, can you imagine something like this in 2020, with Ed Sheeran and Anna Netrebko? Better not to imagine it, believe me.
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