Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli makes Baltimore debut before a crowd of 13,000 at CFG Bank Arena

The line of Andrea Bocelli’s fans waiting to enter CFG Bank Arena, where the famed Italian tenor was about to make his Baltimore debut snaked for two blocks down Howard Street, while motorists attempting to find parking fared little better. Those wanting to catch the beginning of the concert had to arrive at the garage at least an hour before show time.

A day before the concert, the 13,000-seat auditorium had nearly sold out to people who had spent hundreds of dollars for tickets to see an opera singer, who performed his songs almost entirely in Italian, a language relatively few Americans speak. On a Tuesday night.

Ariana Flowers, 28, and her wife Brianna Flowers, 28, drove for two and a half hours Tuesday from Bedford, Pennsylvania, to attend Bocelli’s concert and planned to make the return trip home as soon as the show was over around 11 p.m.  After spending all of 2023 working to pay off their wedding the previous year, the couple had concluded that they deserved a splurge.

“I’ve loved his singing for about 15 years,” said Ariana Flowers, who was introduced to Bocelli’s rich tenor while taking vocal lessons in high school. “He is so passionate and so controlled.”

The 65-year-old Bocelli represents that rarest of phenomena — an opera singer who has crossed over to mainstream acclaim, and who routinely attracts the kind of adulation and pop star treatment typically reserved for, well, Taylor Swift.

Blind since the age of 12, Bocelli was a protégé of opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti. He has performed at the Olympics and at Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The pop star Celine Dion once said, “If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like Andrea Bocelli.”

During an email interview in December, Bocelli wrote that he was looking forward to performing with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which backed him up on stage under the baton of Steven Mercurio.

“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is a feather in the cap of the musical landscape,” he wrote. “I feel honored to be able to collaborate with them.”

Bocelli ended up having to wait longer to perform with the musicians than he had initially planned. A concert originally scheduled at the CFG Bank Arena was postponed for two months after the singer fell ill, and the repertoire was switched from Christmas classics to love songs in honor of Valentine’s Day.

The concert included such special guests as the soprano Larisa Martinez, former “American Idol” contestant Pia Toscano and the Italian rock star Zucchero Fornaciari, who helped launch Bocelli’s career way back in 1992.

The first half of the evening consisted of arias and duets from the operas of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, while the second half gradually eased into more contemporary terrain, from the 19th century Neapolitan standard “Finiculì, Finiculà” to excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” to Joe Crocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.”

This story will be updated.