Passion for song from Blackpool to the Albert Hall

Is he set to follow in the musical footsteps of Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras? Time will tell, but Woodstock tenor Alfie Boe is certainly making a name for himself. Following an appearance in this year's Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, he has just brought out a new CD titled La Passione (pictured below). The disc is devoted to old favourites such as O Sole Mio, Funiculì Funiculà and Granada, as well as several lesser-known songs.

Next spring Alfie will play the major role of Camille de Rosillon in a new English National Opera production of The Merry Widow.

"It wasn't my intention to become an opera singer," Alfie told me when we met up in Woodstock. "At home, I used to have posters of steam trains on my bedroom wall. I wanted to be a train driver. But I grew up listening to classical music through my father - he used to play a lot of it around the house. So it was something that was always accessible to me.

" I think I was also influenced by the local ice cream van. Apart form the ice cream itself, the tune it played was O Sole Mio. So that was probably my first introduction to Italian folk song! But it wasn't until I was 19 that I decided to go professional."

Alfie was born in Blackpool 31 years ago, the youngest of nine children. But he lived there for less than a day. In what must have been quite an upheaval, his parents moved up the road to Fleetwood on the actual day he was born.

However, he returned to Blackpool 17 years later, to start his working life as a finisher in the town's TVR sports car factory. There his workmates shunted him into a corner so that he could listen to his beloved classical music in peace. In return, Alfie would entertain his colleagues on the factory floor.

On one such occasion he was overheard by a customer who had come to see his new car being built. The customer had connections with the music business and pointed Alfie towards a successful audition with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Although Alfie's newly released CD consists largely of Italian folk songs, you have only to hear him speak for a few seconds to know that he comes from the north-west. But if you looked at his birth certificate, you'd spot an Italian influence. His full name is Alfred Giovanni Roncalli Boe.

"We're an Irish Catholic family, and my parents named me after Pope John XXIII. I've often thought of auditioning for an opera house under the name of Alfie Boe, then going back in disguise and auditioning under the name of Giovanni Roncalli, to see if I would be treated differently."

Most of the tracks on Alfie's La Passione CD are frequently recorded. I wondered if he therefore felt under greater pressure to bring something new to each piece?

"I think that's very important. If you did an arrangement of O Sole Mio in exactly the same way as it's been done over the last ten or 15 years, it's just going to be boring. You're not going to get listeners. You have to stamp your own mark on these songs.

"When I learn a new song, I read the words, get a translation if it's in a foreign language, then work on the melody. From there, I gradually mould the words into the melody. Even though I can now read music, and play my line on the piano, I still learn the old-fashioned way that I've always learnt my music - that's by ear. I'm fortunate enough to have good pitch."

The CD is on a major label, EMI Classics. Such companies no longer bend over backwards to make classical recordings, even of popular repertoire, especially when they have to pay for an orchestra like the Royal Philharmonic, which accompanies Alfie on this disc. Was it difficult to secure a deal with a major label?

"It's been a long road. It's taken ten or 11 years to actually sign a deal. You get built up every so often, but then you get knocked down again, and get dropped. It can become a little disheartening. But if you have the determination to do it, to see it through, to know that something will happen one day, then it's worth it in the long run."

Some of the repertoire on the CD is less familiar: Marechiare, for instance, with its frequent changes of tempo. It sounds as if it could be quite difficult to sing.

"It can be. You can start off ahead of yourself, with all guns blazing. Then you need to be ready to pull the voice back for the quiet bits. But the songs are written and structured to suit the singer, so the more you sing them, the more your body becomes capable of doing the routine of the song.

"But I was very happy with the way we structured the recording. If we did need to do retakes, it was because there was something I wanted to do again, or wanted to get more into emotionally."

Alfie, you feel on meeting him, concentrates on putting his emotions into his singing. He doesn't seem the type to put on airs and graces, throw tantrums, or storm off stage in a huff every time something doesn't go his way.

The day we met, costume designer Zandra Rhodes had been sounding off about tenors in the press: "We had a horrible one in The Pearl Fishers," she alleged, "He wouldn't stand still for any of his costume fittings."

What, I wondered, did Alfie think of Ms Rhodes's sweeping generalisation?

"Perhaps she should have stuck a pin in him. But tenors are a very strange bunch. Baritones say that they get the girls. But they don't, it's tenors who get the girls. But you can be a decent tenor if you try!"

Alfie Boe's CD La Passione is on EMI Classics, No. 509995044129.