The children of the hordes of opera and opera-like music fans who once swooned at the ankles of the Three Tenors have a new hero: Roman Vittorio Grigòlo, whose artfully sculpted eyebrows and smouldering eyes are well matched with a winsome voice and ardent expressiveness.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Grigòlo’s third album for Sony Classical is largely sacred, centred around music written to honour Mary, the mother of Jesus, and largely pulled from the hermetically sealed music library at the Vatican, where our now-hot vocalist grew up as a choirboy.
It’s no secret that the Roman Catholic church has not produced great music for a couple of centuries, and the examples Grigòlo puts before our ears — many of them written by his onetime choirmasters and their immediate predecessors — is sentimental goo, unflattered by the tenor’s own meddlesome arrangements.
To make the disc more palatable to a wider audience, the album includes Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria and Ständchen (or, more precisely, Jacques Offenbach’s arrangement, La Sérénade de Schubert), César Franck’s Panis angelicus, Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and, as a bonus, Adolphe Adam’s O Holy Night with guest partner Jackie Evancho.
The Ingemisco from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem is also present, but sung, like everything else, in a mild-mannered church style, rather than in a full-chested concert blast.
Despite Grigòlo’s fine voice and singing, the whole comes across like a plate of lukewarm buttermilk pancakes drowned in too much syrup.
The orchestra sounds thin, the digital organ is an embarrassment and the choristers of the Pontifical Chapel are nowhere near as polished as the kids we’re used to hearing in other places, not the least being Toronto’s own St Michael’s Choir School.
This is one of those discs only a Grigòlo acolyte, or someone looking to stir a heaping spoonful of saccharine into their daily background listening, can love.
You’ll find the details here.
This is the making-of video:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
