Celine Dion, whose hit single "The Power of Love" has been No. 1 on the American pop charts for the last month, has a voice so devoid of strong stylistic inflections that her singing suggests a computer-determined vocal composite of international pop divas. Listening to her enunciating in a phonetically perfect English, you can as easily imagine her being Japanese or Greek or Spanish as North American. In fact, Ms. Dion who is 25, is French Canadian and has spoken English for only six years.
Ms. Dion, who appeared at Town Hall on Monday evening, is a belter with a high, thin, slightly nasal, nearly vibratoless soprano and a good-sized arsenal of technical skills. She can deliver tricky melismas, produce expressive vocal catches and sustain long notes without the tiniest wavering of pitch. And as her two hit duets, "Beauty and the Beast" (with Peabo Bryson) and "When I Fall in Love" (with Clive Griffin) have shown, she is a reliable harmony voice.
At Monday's concert, her New York debut, Ms. Dion was demure, charming and tense in the well-schooled manner of international pop stars trying to make a good impression on Americans. Accompanied by two keyboards, guitar, bass and drums and three backup singers, she concentrated on songs from her three albums for Epic Records.
Ms. Dion's trademark songs -- "Where Does My Heart Beat Now?" "If You Asked Me To" and "The Power of Love" -- are big, sweeping ballads that, in contrast to hits by Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, have a formal European feel. They are the kind of generic pop anthems that win international song competitions and that Olympic athletes choose to accompany their routines. In "The Power of Love," Ms. Dion declaims clunking sentiments like "I am your lady, and you are my man" with a quasi-operatic solemnity.
The concert, during which Ms. Dion's singing was sometimes electronically echoed to enhance the soap-opera grandiosity of her material, was carried off with a machine-tooled polish. Not once, however, did she begin to transcend the role of grateful presenter of glitzy commercial goods.
