While he's filled arenas around the world, Andrea Bocelli is just as happy playing dining rooms. But it'll cost ya.

The Italian tenor and "popera" superstar was in Toronto last night to play an intimate $1,800-a-plate fundraiser dinner at the Windsor Arms Hotel. Proceeds from the function went to the World Trade Center Relief Fund and the Toronto Italian Film Festival.

Bocelli, currently touring in support of his new pop album Cieli di Toscana, took time out for a press conference yesterday afternoon.

It was the singer's first visit since performing a sold-out concert at the Air Canada Centre last April, and he welcomed the chance to get away from all those mikes and wires.

"There's not that much difference in where you sing, but in how you sing," Bocelli said through a translator.

"Classical music has its very strict rules, and one of them is that you sing live. With pop music we've been a little bit spoiled because we've been used to listening to it at a very high volume. In this sense, we've also lost something in terms of quality."

As someone who's blended opera and pop and had enormous success doing so, Bocelli is still open to criticism from opera purists that he's watered the music down for the masses.

"There are different ways of thinking, even amongst (opera fans)," Bocelli said. "There are those opera lovers who will be pleased, as I am, that with my pop music I will be enlarging the audience and drawing them towards opera.

"I follow in great footsteps, for example Caruso, who did the same before me. Of course, there are also the hardcore fans of opera who perhaps love it with a little bit of snobism and want to see it kept to itself.

"I certainly respect their view, as I hope they respect ours."

That said, he doesn't expect to see many pop singers rushing to cash in on his territory.

"I don't know if there's anyone who has the desire," he said. "Aside from the experiment that Michael Bolton did a few years ago.

"The world of opera requires strict rules about the way you are physically, and also it requires a lot of sacrifices that the pop world doesn't demand from the singers. I also think that the theatre of opera is somewhat of a vocation, and who has it has it from the beginning."

He added with a smile: "You have to be crazy to want to sing opera. On the one hand you have the pop world, with its large audiences and huge record sales. On the other hand you have the world of opera: Small theatres, lower record sales, smaller audiences.

"And lots of criticism."