Charlotte Church is just 13 and a budding classical music star. Most divas don’t ask that trips to Disney World be included in their recording contracts, but then Charlotte Church is rather unusual. Her album of hymns and folk songs, “Voice of an Angel,” climbed to No. 1 in Britain’s classical charts and reached the top 10 in the pop charts after its release last fall. It went double-platinum in five weeks, making it a merry Christmas indeed for Sony, which signed Church for a reported £100,000 advance on a five-album contract last spring. She sang for the pope’s Christmas concert and Prince Charles’s birthday party. She’s met George Michael, posed in heels and furs for magazines and is being promoted as the biggest thing to hit classical music since Pavarotti. Says her mother, 32-year-old Maria Church, who quit her job in a Cardiff public-housing office to help manage her daughter’s career: “I know how the Spice Girls’s mothers feel.”
Raised in a close-knit Welsh Catholic family, Charlotte Church began singing in church benefits and karaoke competitions at the age of 3. When a television show asked talented kids to audition, Church called and sang a few lines from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Requiem” over the phone. An agent snapped her up. At 11, she begged her voice coach, Louise Ryan, to teach her to sing like a grown-up. Ryan laughed it off: nobody can produce an operatic sound until they’re grown, she told Church. But Charlotte insisted, so Ryan showed her how to breathe and project properly. Most child singers produce “white sound”–glass-clear notes that sound pretty in choirs but dull in solos. Charlotte’s voice resembles a scaled-down diva’s: she rounds her sound, injecting color to enhance phrasing or meanings. “Her voice is a mix between a child’s and an adult’s,” says Jeremy Colton, executive producer of the Sony album. Purists say Charlotte’s singing isn’t so much a subtle blend as it is the sound of a kid straining at notes she’s too young to hit squarely. “A couple of the opera critics really slagged her off,” admits Maria Church. “But that’s disrespectful.” So there’s a good deal of hurry-up-and-wait when it comes to Charlotte Church. Voice experts debate whether she’ll end up a soprano or contralto, and speculate on whether it will deliver on its enormous promise. At the back of skeptics’ minds are the specters of earlier child singers: the Welsh boy soprano who had platinum records in the ’80s–until his voice changed, and the Scots’s prodigy who sank from stardom into eating disorders and has-been-hood. It’s clear that Charlotte’s been schooled in the quicksilver nature of fame. She’ll recite the cautionary tale of her aunt, a cabaret singer without a national hit. She’ll tell you of her grandfather, whose band sang for an Israeli prime minister and “who almost made it, but didn’t quite get there.” When Church went with her manager and mother to talk about a contract with a dozen Sony executives, she went with a list of questions about her future. “What happens if, when I’m 15, I want to dye my hair purple and get tattoos?” she asked. The answer: “We’ll just have to turn you into Alanis Morissette.”
When she grows up, Charlotte wants to sing Tosca and Madama Butterfly at La Scala in Milan. For now, much of her life seems disarmingly normal. She goes to a Cardiff school, photocopying missed work when concerts keep her out of classes. She has a pet lizard named Iggie, plays games like Heretic and Blood on her computer and has singing lessons for two hours on Sunday afternoons. Get her chatting, and you see that she’s hard-wired for performance. She does a mean impression of Jerry Springer guests–“Don’t even go there, girl.” There’s scarcely a beat between an account of the joys of the PlayStation that Sony gave her for Christmas, and of getting blessed by the pope: “He made a huuuuuge sign of the cross.”
Last month Charlotte visited the United States to do critics’ showcases before the release of “Voice of an Angel” in March. For Charlotte, America means burgers, “Frasier” and Puff Daddy. For Sony, it means the mother of all markets. The Italians love Charlotte’s Catholicism and her close-knit family. The Japanese are keen on the novelty of a tiny girl with a huge voice. The British are proud that she was homegrown in Wales. But America remains the great frontier, one that Maria Church admits makes her “apprehensive.” Yet William Morris has just signed her, and her agent says there’s interest from Hollywood. What’s more, says her mother, if anything goes wrong, “she’s got a damn good lawyer.” And–for now anyway–a damn good voice.
