Celine Dion's success as a pop chanteuse in Europe and the US still amazes. Québecois pop singers almost never climb to world-class stardom, though it's hard to say why, because even among Dion's homegrown rivals -- Laurence Jalbert, Marie-Carmen, Julie Masse -- one finds grit and power and diva style to spare. But Dion, who plays Great Woods this Tuesday, does have one quality as a chanteuse that no other Québecoise even tries to offer: limitless adaptability.

Brassy showtunes, vulnerable ballads, dreamy Europop, speed rock, Wynonna-style soul -- you name it and Dion will sing it, perfectly in tune and with flawless diction, in a buffed-up, shoeshine tone that never stoops to cheap affectations. She avoids both the tasteless heavy-handedness of a Whitney Houston and the gratuitous ethereality of Mariah Carey. Whether you listen to her English-language Falling into You or D'eux (both on Sony 550, and the latter a number one in France since last fall), when Dion sings you hear nothing but the facts, the text of her lyrics fitted to the emotion without any kind of spillage or embroidery. And if the voice completely changes shape depending on the audience it's aimed at -- from the higher-than-high flutter notes of the Europop of D'eux to the full alto stomach of Falling into You -- still, its character is always the same: disciplined intensity.

Dion hews to the center line of a song, never its edges. As a Quebec singer trained by the tradition of French chanson to follow the text of a lyric like a soldier obeying orders, she delivers the obvious meaning of a song only. She doesn't even hint at possible undercurrents, ironies, double-entendres. If they're there, it's up to the listener to find them. But maybe they aren't there. The bluntness of Falling into You's many declarations of love harbors no bubbles of maybe, no fault lines of guess-again. Dion's singing presents love to the listener, bodily and entire -- a known fact that leaves no room for quibblings and hesitations.

Few current pop singers take this approach. The more common point of view is loss of self and a loveless ache, "entre apathie et pesanteur où je demeure . . . mon amour, mon moi, je sais qu'il existe," as a rival chanteuse's French hit puts it. Dion doesn't ever say "je sais qu'il existe," with its undertone of "maybe he doesn't exist after all." Instead, she says, "I know this much is true/I was blessed because I was loved by you" (from "Because You Loved Me)." Whether the setting is symphonic, speed-rock, or choral, in D'eux, or boldly guitared and melodically stolid, as in most of Falling into You, Dion presents herself, definitively and face to face, as she vows all her trust and self to her lover.

Sounds more like a wedding ceremony than the bedroom sexiness we've come to expect of pop songs, and so it should; Dion's marriage to her manager, René Angelil, took place (just before these CDs were recorded) in Montreal's Notre Dame cathedral, ornate and dressy, before an audience of hundreds. The certainty of Falling into You and D'eux reflects that moment. In these CDs, Dion promises her whole self, forever. Mere sexiness can't and won't do. It never does do in a Dion song. Not since she was a teenage singing sensation in Quebec has she done the moans, sighs, and resorting to heavy breathing that punctuate the cheap come-ons of post-disco pop. Not even when Jean-Jacques Goldman, producer of D'eux, lifts the music high toward dreamland does Dion give in to a one-night-love-affair gesture. For her, forever is the forum in which words -- intensely voiced, as she always shapes them -- carry all the meaning, all the love and dedication there is to say. In Dion's principles, there's never a need to grope for "mon amour, mon Wesson, mon artifice," as the rival French hit I quoted above so desperately puts it. Dion's steady certainty rises triumphantly above the fuss and fidgeting of video-age anomie. Perhaps that's why we who rarely love French singers love Celine Dion.