An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona

 (2009)

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray delivers stunning video and audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
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An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray Review

Pop operatic sensations Il Divo delight a mostly female audience in Barcelona with this high tech combination of stagecraft and florid vocalizing.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 6, 2010

My favorite credit in quite some time rolled by at the end of An Evening with Il Divo Live in Barcelona: Groomer. For if there's one thing Il Divo definitely is, it's groomed. For those of you who may have been living under a rock for the past few years, you may not be acquainted with this multinational quartet, handpicked by none other than American Idol's Simon Cowell, who knows (or at least thinks he knows) something about pop music success. Interestingly, Cowell packaged these singers as a sort of Three Tenors plus one, able to traipse through both classical and pop repertoire, almost always with gargantuan, if admittedly often incredibly sumptuous, orchestrations and a sort of hyperbolic emotional content one usually expects in the histrionic world of grand opera. It's not hard to witness Il Divo's effect on a gaggle of middle aged women during this concert. They hang on every note, often mouthing the multilingual lyrics along with the singers, and many of them are reduced to tears, one assumes of the good kind. This is the sort of rock star reaction some of these women probably granted The Beatles or The Rolling Stones a generation earlier. The times, they are a-changin'.

Il Divo

I frankly came to this concert expecting to abhor it. As someone who values musical talent and integrity at least as much as most people, and perhaps more due to my professional musical career, there's something about these pre-packaged groups that just gets my goat. When something is as craftily put together as Il Divo was by Cowell, real artistry is often cast asunder and what you're left with is an extremely glamorous looking façade with next to nothing underneath.

Well, color me at least a little surprised if not an outright convert. Il Divo is comprised of four very genuinely gifted vocalists: tenors David Miller and Urs Bühler from the U.S. and Switzerland respectively, as well as baritones Carlos Martin from Spain and France's Sébastian Izambard. While the emotional current of this particular concert is too frequently set to overdrive, with barely a chance to get a breath of relief in between the various overwrought crescendi, the singers each acquit themselves marvelously throughout the hour and a half or so of this concert. There's careful attention paid to the arrangements, which do tend toward the treacly, but which catapult the quartet into some memorable ensemble moments, with the tenors often reaching stratospheric heights, as Miller does repeatedly on "Amazing Grace." (It's rather funny to see this immortal hymn performed as an autograph opportunity during the concert).

This is a glitzy and well rehearsed show that doesn't leave much to chance, but which delivers the goods for Il Divo's legion of female fans. The group is able to get up close and personal with the adoring throngs courtesy of a thrust stage which also loops out around various subgroups of the audience. While the overly managed stagecraft can get a bit bothersome (how spontaneous can it really be when all four singers have identical bouquets bestowed upon them as they waltz around the circle?), the audience in the stadium sized hall in Barcelona is obviously eating up every last minute of it, spontaneity be damned. What keeps the concert from being completely plasticized is the quartet's seeming ingenuous disbelief that all of this hoopla is for them. They often seem genuinely surprised and delighted that the audience is so overcome with emotion being able to see them perform live in public. There's nary a hint of arrogance or star attitude among the men, which is refreshing to behold.

Another thing that helps at least partially ameliorate the "made for success" patina that's slathered on this group by Cowell and his production team is the willingness to explore a rather diverse repertoire. Therefore we get everything from their quasi-originals like "Mama," to pop classics (often sung in Italian or other unexpected tongues) like Harry Nilsson's "Without Her," mixed with the occasional snippets of actual classics, like an adaptation of Albinoni's "Adagio," or the interpolation of Faure's "Pavane" as an instrumental interlude in their tune "Isabel." If the emotional content is kept purely at the near hysterical level most of the time, the songs themselves offer a nice variety of textures and arrangements.

As with most of these huge stadium events, there's a significant amount of high-tech wizardry accompanying the show. To Il Divo's credit, they feature a full orchestral consort placed around the stage, but behind and around all the performers are a virtually ceaseless array of projections. It's hard to tell from this presentation whether or not it's a video only effect, but several of these projections seems to be three dimensional holographic images that "float" over the thrust, almost within arm's reach of the audience. It adds a nice layer of visual allure to the concert, though it of course also adds another level of big budget flamboyance to the entire affair.

The set list for this concert is:

Somewhere
Unbreak My Heart
La Promessa
Angelina
Isabel
Bridge Over Troubled Water
She
Passera
Unchained Melody
Mama
Nights in White Satin
The Winner Takes It All
Without You
Pour Que Tu M'Aimes Encore
Everytime I Look at You
Hallelujah
Adagio
La Vida Sin Amor
Caruso
The Power of Love
My Way
Amazing Grace
The Impossible Dream

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

Il Divo's really nicely textured AVC encoded image is one of the better looking concert videos in recent memory. Filled with inky jet blacks and a gorgeous array of various stage lighting effects, this presentation pops and bristles with detail. Even medium to far shots reveal a wealth of information, and when the camera cuts to close-ups of the various soloists, my hunch is female hearts will be a-flutter at being able to count every hair on their favorite's head. The best part of this presentation is the nicely varied palette, which gives us everything from cool blues (quite a bit of the time, actually) to a really nice sunny Tuscan yellow ambience toward the end of the concert. In fact, the Blu-ray reveals specks of dust floating in the air in that yellow segment, clearly seen by dint of the backlighting utilized.

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

Likewise, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix is superb, offering a warm and inviting sound, and really smartly using discrete channel effects for the various singers. As the quartet splits up and moves around the circular thrust, you'll be able to clearly hear their voices move from channel to channel, letting the viewer become immersed in the soundscape as if they're right in the pricey "up close and personal" seats. Fidelity is superb throughout this offering, catching all of the powerful vocal effects these four gentlemen proffer with alarming regularity. Dynamic range is also excellent, and the balance between the orchestral forces and the quartet of singers is always spot on. I don't recomment the lossless 2.0 folddown for this particular concert--there's too much close harmony singing here and the 5.1 separates the sometimes similar timbres of the vocalists more clearly.

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

A 10:32 SD featurette shows the quartet backstage and rehearsing for the show. It's pretty standard EPK fare.

An Evening with il Divo: Live in Barcelona Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

You have to hand it to Simon Cowell for so perfectly taking the Andrea Bocelli rage and upping the ante fourfold. Just as surprisingly, Il Divo manages to actually deliver musically, though my hunch is operatic purists will be rolling their eyes at the pop sensibilties on display here. However, Il Divo's legion of mostly female fans are sure to be delighted with this concert, which is given a spectacular Blu-ray release.

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