Queen frontman
Freddie Mercury's Barcelona (1987), a collaboration with Spanish soprano
Montserrat Caballé, is less celebrated than other fusions of rock and operatic music but is actually one of the more successful -- support for this contention coming from the fact that the album was condemned by both rock and opera fans for making too many concessions to the other form.
Mercury wrote broad, fast numbers that show he gave some thought to how to merge the dramatic qualities of the two forms without recourse to the intermediate conventions of the musical stage, and this revival of the music by performers unconnected with
Caballé or the late
Mercury is thus welcome in principle. Unfortunately, it's hard to know what the low-end Dutch label Brilliant was after here. For one thing, despite the strenuous proclamations on the packaging that this is Barcelona: The Rock Opera, it is no such thing, and
Mercury specifically warned against promoting it with this terminology. It was an album, a set of songs with various sources (and in various languages) very loosely centered on
Caballé's native city of Barcelona, which at the time was soon to be home to the 1992 Olympic Games. There is no action, no staging, and no real need to include the texts, which in any case are not included here. Dutch soprano Karin ten Cate doesn't sound much like
Caballé, but she is at least in the ballpark -- more than can be said for tenor Salvo Bruno, whose musical-theater voice (to say nothing of his Italian accent) is unsuited to the
Mercury material. Barcelona is eminently worthy of revival by another rock-operatic pair, and they might even make use of the suitably splashy symphonic arrangments by Mario Previti used here -- they pick up on the orchestral elements used on the original album and indeed on many of
Queen's songs. But this rendering isn't true to the music.