Why is he Greece’s ‘best-kept secret’?

"Greece’s best kept secret" is out with a new album. It comes in due time. Since the release of Sometimes I Dream two years ago, Mario Frangoulis has appeared on stage (in a production of the so-called Achilleis), on screen (a cameo in the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely), and on video (Sometimes I Dream–In Concert). He recorded a duet with Lara Fabian in the De-Lovely soundtrack, but he has shied away from recording a full-length album.

Follow Your Heart is his worthy sophomore effort, which like its predecessor is a blend of pop, classical, and Latin music. Once again, the Greek tenor sings in four languages (English, Spanish, Greek, and Italian), and so lives up to his classification as a purveyor of "world" music. The song selections, specially the ones in English, are noticeably more accessible (read: pop) this time around and will give, for good or ill, the likes of Christian Bautista more material to cover in the near future.

Although they are all well done, the songs make you wonder why a man of Frangoulis’s talent has to sing lyrics that remind you of second-rate homilies: "Follow your heart / Wherever it takes you / Nobody knows / Where the wind blows / No one can say." Words like these prevent the songs from being truly uplifting.

Dance has a melody commensurate to its message, but it also has a refrain found in many a refrigerator magnet: "Dance like there’s nobody watching / Sing as if no one’s listening to / What you’re hearing / Love like you’ve never been hurt before / Try to forget if we can / And just dance." (The refrigerator magnet I have attributes the quote to Alfred D’Souza, but there are other claimants, from Rumi to Mark Twain to "anonymous".)

Worst are the words in what is now an obligatory component of "popera" albums: the film-score-turned-song. The victim this time is not the much-cannibalized Ennio Moriconne but John Barry. To the main theme of Barry’s score for Dances with Wolves were added doggerel lines, and Here’s to the Heroes, written to celebrate the Olympic games in Athens, is born: "Here’s to the heroes / who aim so high / Here’s to the heroes / who do or die." Parts of the melody are reminiscent of One Moment in Time from another year’s Olympic games, and it is, not surprisingly, only when Frangoulis is singing the few lines in Greek that the song truly takes on heroic dimensions.

Of course, upon inspection the lyrics of the non-English songs can be just as tawdry, but knowing "little Latin and less Greek," we can let that pass. In either case, the sheer magnitude and magnificence of Frangoulis’s carry the day and render the deadwood some dignity.

The other English songs, all hum-able, are Come What May, theme of Moulin Rouge; Bridge of Dreams, an "initiation song"; and Another World, an adaptation of the Va’ Pensiero from Verdi’s Nabucco. In the last, all possible political overtones are swept aside, and the voices of the Hebrew slaves are replaced by that of a lone lover professing love’s capacity to open "another world." (It is tempting to imagine how Frangoulis would adapt the "Anvil chorus.")

Of the non-English materials, Adagio, a movement from a concerto by Alessandro Marcello, best showcases Frangoulis’s operatic capacities, and it succeeds where Here’s to the Heroes fails. Frangoulis’s Ave Maria (entitled Un’anima Sola) is not going to replace either Schubert’s or Gonoud’s any time soon, although melodically it partakes a little of both. Finally, the Latin-inspired Enas Hartino Ilios and Cu’ Mme (a duet with Melody, a Spanish singer who sounds like Thalia) enliven the ballad-heavy album.

"I live for making good music," writes Frangoulis in the album jacket. To an extent, Follow Your Heart bears out that claim. Certainly, even a cursory listening is enough to convince one that Frangoulis should not be kept a secret at all.