Watch: Andrea Bocelli drops in on Ed Sheeran’s Wembley show
mainIt’s the first time he has sung live with the British singer-songwriter.
The official version of their duet has been watched 120 million times.
That’s 100 times more than Bocelli’s Pearl Fishers duet with Placido Domingo.
The Sheeran song is a modern classic.
I know plenty of people who like Bocelli, so I cut him some slack. He’s good at what he does – a hybrid between ‘pop’ and classically trained vocals. I have more of an issue with these ‘tenors’ type groups that sing all kinds of pop garbage in a bravura, fake-operatic manner (Canadian Tenors, Eritrean Tenors, Jordanian Tenor, Former Yugoslavian Tenors, etc.).
Actually I don’t think he is musically or vocally good at all at what he does. Maybe he was in the 1990s, but for more than a decade I hear an unpleasantly strained voice and mediocre phrasing. Yet as long as people pay to see him, maybe also to hear him, I suppose there is no reason to interfere with the free market.
If this is a modern classic, so is Bocelli’s Con Te Partiro, which is the song probably most people still associate with him, and which many others have been prepared to cover.
He has always struck me as a very agreeable singer of popular songs of that sort — his Viva Per Lei duet with Georgia is very cool. It’s a pleasant light tenor, sufficiently trained to stay on key, breathe in the right places, and possessed of some nice tone. If he overreached with some of the operatic efforts, he is hardly the only one, but his voice is more than up to some of the hymns he has recorded and to better quality popular songs. Unlike all too many pop singers of recent decades, let alone years, he is intelligible and melodic.
You forgot Il Volo and El Divo. Some of the voices are actually quite fine and would probably grow into decent operatic material were it for the temptation of quick $$$.
Pity. I remember Robertino Loretti who was hailed as the next Caruso.
Ended up with a passable baritone just enough to sing pop songs.
Also, let’s not forget that Grigolo was a popera tenor for the first decade of his career. He made the transition to the opera stage when his voice was ready.