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Title: Provincial at Best
Review: Always looking for new talent and certainly aware of the reputation of Mr. Alvarez, I was extremely disappointed to find a colorless, unfocussed voice with virtually no innate musical sense, much less a familiarity with French operatic style. The voice is tight and wooden, with approaches to the high notes varyingly grunting and gnashing of teeth. Is this merely the result of a basically untrained natural talent succumbing to an international career? After hearing beautiful work from both Ramon Vargas and Juan Diego Florez, and acceptable singing from Roberto Alagna and Ben Heppner in the past few months, I must say that Sony has a talent search on their hands if they are to compete with RCA, Decca, DG and EMI.
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