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Il Divo comes to town
| Date: |
11 March 2007 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Carol Albertyn Christie
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Urs Bühler (Il Divo Member): 'If you imagine a situation that you take four people who have never seen, never spoken to each other before. Four professional, proven musicians who have had their own solo careers for ten, twenty-five years and you put them in a studio and you say: 'We want to create something new.' That's how it all started.'
Devi Govender (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Il Divo means divine male performer. Dressed in Armani suits with looks to swoon for, they certainly have the heavenly bodies and the voices of angels. Il Divo was created by the infamous Simon Cowell, who had the idea to form a multi-national quartet. He spent two years auditioning for suitable voices.
Not known to mince his words, Simon is one of the judges on the Idols series. But his insults are not without merit. He's a highly prosperous record producer who has created many successful bands, Il Divo being one of them.'
Simon Cowell (Executive: Sony BMG): 'It's very simple. They are just four great singers with bags of charisma and charm. It's as simple as that.'
He says his inspiration for forming Il Divo was when he heard Andrea Bocelli singing Time to say Goodbye with Sarah Brightman.
Simon: 'In my later years I suddenly started to appreciate how good classical music can be. In particular how good a male operatic classical voice can be.'
Simon contacted voice agents around the world asking for four of the best undiscovered male operatic voices.
Carlos Marin (Il Divo Member): 'They never told me it was about ... well ... to make a group, or to be part of a group.'
David Miller (Il Divo Member): 'I was told it was somewhere between opera and crossover and I didn't even know who I was auditioning for.'
Urs Bühler: 'And then I just sang an aria for him in his office, just without a piano, nothing, just a cappella.'
Carlos: 'They told me: 'Could you stay here three more days?' 'No.' 'Are you available next year?' 'No.' ' Do you want to do this?' I said, 'no.' So, I just left and I remember four days later my manager called me and said: 'Look Simon Cowell would like to meet you.' I said: 'Who is Simon Cowell?' '
Simon: 'Well it was a difficult process convincing them to do what I wanted to do because they didn't know me.'
Urs: 'I had never heard of him, because apparently in the UK and in America he's notorious but in the rest of Europe he is completely unknown.'
Simon: 'All I asked them was to trust me and to say look, if you hate what we're going to record then obviously I will never put it out. But I have a vision here and I think I can do something with you, which is going to be spectacular.'
Simon's vision was a little out of the ordinary, he wanted to take popular songs and give them a smooth classical Italian feel. The first song they tried was Unbreak my Heart.
Devi: 'What were your thoughts at the very beginning? Did you think that it was going to work?'
Sébastien Izambard (Il Divo Member): 'I was very surprised to hear voices like that in pop songs. That was the first time for me, so that's kind of ... you going to get used to it. It's a new thing and I was quite surprised and sceptical in a way.'
Devi: 'Did any of you have a gut feeling while you were in your first recording sessions for the first album that something special was happening here?'
David: 'When they played Unbreak my Heart back to us, there was something magical about it. There was, you know, hearing our four voices blended in such a way ... it was new, it was unique and I knew that if we could just continue making high level recordings like this, it would go as far as we could take it.'
In just six months they became the biggest debut act in the world, they achieved 26 no.1 chart positions internationally. Their first album smashed Led Zeppelin's 25 year record of being the only band to achieve a no.1 album without a commercial single release.
Simon: 'It was the best record I have ever been involved in my career. It was just one of those special moments.'
David: 'We were hoping for top ten, something like that 'cause we knew we had made a great record, but when they told us it was no.1 we just sat in silence for about half an hour just completely overwhelmed.'
Urs: 'For me, I have only been in the classical music scene and all of a sudden you enter in the pop scene, which is a totally different world and you release a first album straight to no. 1. That is just too big ... it's just unimaginable.'
Given that they sing most of their songs in Italian one would have imagined that they were born there - but none of them were. David Miller is a tenor from America who left a promising operatic career to join Il Divo. Carlos Marin is a Spanish baritone who started performing at the age of seven. Although Urs Bühler from Switzerland started a heavy metal band as a teenager he soon developed his lyric tenor voice. Sébastien Izambard is the only member that is not classically trained; he was a singer, songwriter in France.
Sébastien: 'So Il Divo I think it is a mixture of different cultures. It's like put everything together, mix it in a cocktail and you shake it and just see the essence of the passion, love and just fantastic expression of different cultures. I think that is the essence of Il Divo. That's the magical thing.'
Il Divo is often described as an operatic super group. But some classical purists describe their music as popularist.
Urs: 'We do not sing classical repertoire. We use, especially in the ends of the songs ... in the finals, a classical voice technique.'
David: 'I think the classical purists are probably the single greatest thing that is killing classical music 'cause back in the day when classical music was being written, it was considered pop music. La donna e mobile from Rigoletto - Verdi had to keep that particular song a secret because he knew how catchy it was going to be and it caught on and it was popular. So you know, where do you draw that line?'
Il Divo is certainly having the time of their lives. In their three years they not only sung with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Céline Dion, but they also recorded the official anthem of the 2006 FIFA World Cup with Toni Braxton performing in front of an international audience of one billion.
Simon: 'I think these guys have got a much, much bigger future than even they know. It simply boils down to them wanting to stay together. And if they want to stay together and they are happy to stay together, they could be doing this in 20 years time for sure.'
Sébastien: 'The hope for the future ... just go on as well as we do now and obviously that we have the same feeling and the same love from all the people that watch us. I mean maybe we can be together for ten or twenty years. [It] depends on the audience.'
David: 'So many things keep coming up that I myself never would have imagined in my future, so it really makes it difficult for me to imagine the future because the reality exceeds any dreams that I had up until this point.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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