Il Volo may look like a boy band, but they have become a pop-opera phenomenon
Italy's Teenage Three Tenors Take America By Storm
By Tom Kington
He has managed Mick Jagger and AC/DC, but when Steve Leber saw teenage girls screaming as three Italian boys hit their operatic high notes, he knew he was looking at something really new.
"After seeing a million groups I never saw young guys hit notes like that. It was like a great riff, like a rock band exploding," he said. "It was as good as when I first saw the Rolling Stones."
Piero Barone, 17, Ignazio Boschetto, 17, and Gianluca Ginoble, 16, make up Il Volo, a group that has fused Justin Bieber's teen appeal with the soaring voices of the Three Tenors and is set for release in the UK after wowing America and racking up 600,000 sales worldwide in five months.
The group's breakthrough came as guests on America's Pop Idol in May, where their freshened up, Latin flavoured version of O Sole Mio stunned the crowd, drew applause from a beaming Jennifer Lopez and got them bookings to sing their mix of pop-opera love songs on talk shows across the US.
At first sight, they look every inch the boy band. Barone is serious with spiky hair and glasses, Boschetto is smiley and plump, while Ginoble has the brooding stare of a matinee idol.
They love Lady Gaga, interrupt each other jokingly in broken English during interviews, fight over pizza slices on the tour bus and cite Maroon 5 as one of their favourite acts, alongside Michael Bublé and Andrea Bocelli.
But comparisons with boy bands stop when they start singing, according to their Italian manager, Michele Torpedine. "They are a phenomenon, a force of nature," he said.
"We are halfway between the Three Tenors and the Jonas Brothers, but no 16-year-olds have ever sung like us before," says Boschetto. And few performers singing opera have incited pubescent girls to shriek, "I love you!"
After learning the basics from their grandparents and honing their skills at music festivals in local piazzas – Barone and Boschetto in Sicily, Ginoble in Abruzzo — they made it separately on to Italy's version ofPop Idol in 2009, where an enterprising producer made them belt out O Sole Mio as a group. Torpedine was watching the show alongside Tony Renis, a veteran crooner who penned the syrupy classic Quando Quando Quando in 1962 and gained notoriety for hanging around with mobsters.
"We took a clip of the boys to Geffen records in the US where they went mad," recalls Torpedine. Renis quickly set to work on the boys' album with producer Humberto Gatica, who has worked with Bublé and Celine Dion, the first of a number of heavyweight music business svengalis who have committed to steering Il Volo to global domination, from Geffen's Jimmy Iovine, who helped launch Lady Gaga, to longtime Madonna publicist Liz Rosenburg and heavy metal management legend Steve Leber, who came out of retirement to assist Torpedine on the current US tour after he saw Il Volo sing at a Florida wedding.
It is the group's youth, says the dream team, which gives it the edge over Il Divo, the other pop-opera group invented by Simon Cowell in 2003, while their genuine vocal skills can grab the attention of teens reared on TV talent shows.
Promotion in the US focused on TV, combined with a "real tough grind" of appearances at parties attended by industry bigwigs, said Leber. Accompanied on tour by parents, the group is now learning to sing in Chinese, after songs sung in Spanish helped to earn them Latin Grammy nominations.
One market where superstardom may be elusive is Italy. "Three kids singing O Sole Mio is not groundbreaking here," admitted a spokeswoman. After performing the standard, moaned one Italian blogger, "they might as well have performed in front of a plate of spaghetti and talked like they do in The Sopranos."
But Leber said the group went far beyond stereotypes: "One word: charisma. People want to touch them. They are not what I call a turntable act, it's all about great live performances. And that is how you build the foundations of a supergroup."
**They are singing in Chinese?? I need to hear it!! :)
Source: The Guardian
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