Il Volo … Takes Flight (AEG Ehrlich Ventures, Interscope Records, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 18), my husband Charles and I watched an engaging classical-pops crossover concert video by an Italian singing trio called Il Volo (“The Flight”). The video was called Il Volo … Takes Flight (though there’s some uncertainty about the ellipsis in the title and whether it belongs there) and was an early live album from Detroit with the Detroit Symphony in 2011. Il Volo organized when its three members, tenors Ignazio Boschetto and Gianloca Ginoble and light baritone Piero Barone, met in 2009 when they separately entered a televised singing contest in Italy called Ti Lascio una Canzone (“I Bring You a Song”). Roberto Cenci, the show’s producer, had the idea of teaming them as a sort of younger version of the “Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras), who had created a sensation when they performed together for the 1990 opening ceremonies of the World Cup soccer tournament in Rome. Tony Renis, an Italian-American singer and music producer in L.A., saw Il Volo perform on a clip from an RAI (Radio-Televizione Italiana) TV show and decided they had the makings of international superstars. He got them a contract with Geffen Records and got their first CD, which contains much of the same material they performed here, released in 2010. This show was shot on October 21, 2011 at the Detroit Opera House just two years after Il Volo (first called “The Three Tenorinos” and then “The Tryo” before settling on “Il Volo” in late 2010) formed. They’re still together and still singing the mix of Neapolitan folk songs, Latin pop songs, pieces from movie soundtracks and occasional forays into the light-rock repertoire that they did here.

One thing that surprised me about the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as shown here is its membership was overwhelmingly female. Women musicians have had a long, hard struggle to overcome the sexism of the traditional music world, and even in the most advanced European ensembles we’re used to seeing a smattering of women players among the ranks of men. This orchestra is the opposite: you had to look really long and hard to find the handful of male players in this sea of mostly female faces and bods. Il Volo sang mostly Italian songs, though of their 15 selections there were two each in English (Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” based on the main theme of his score for the 1936 film Modern Times, and Bryan Adams’s “This Time”) and Spanish (Agustín Lara’s “Granada” and Roberto Cantoral’s “El Reloj,” which I realized was in Spanish when Il Volo’s members sang the word for “night” as “noche” instead of “notte”). Il Volo began the concert with their first song, “Il Mondo” (“The World”) by Carlo Pes, Lilli Greco, Gianni Meccia, Jimmy Fontana based on themes from Ennio Morricone’s film scores. Then Piero Barone (who did most, though not all, of the interacting with the crowd) announced that for the next hour or so “you’re all going to be Italians,” which wasn’t quite true as only 11 of the 15 songs they sang all night were in Italian (and one was a translation of an English-language pop song by Josh Groban, Marco Marinangeli and Walter Afansieff called “This Time”). After “Il Mondo,” a hit for Andrea Bocelli (who plows much the same pop-classical territory as Il Volo, though the trio does it considerably better), they sang another recent Italian pop song, “Un Amore Così Grande” (“Such a Great Love”), written by Antonella Maggio and Guido Maria Ferelli for fellow Italian pop singer Claudio Villa.

After that Ignacio Boschetto, whom I thought was both the cutest of the three (he had black curly hair and his face resembled the young John Lennon’s) and the one with the strongest voice (he had good enough high notes I could imagine him having a career in opera), sang a solo on their first traditional Neapolitan song of the night, “Ti Voglio Tanto Bene” (the title means “I love you” but in a familial or affectionate, not a romantic or sexual, way). The song was written by Ernesto De Curtis (music) and Domenico Furnò (lyrics) for a 1936 film alternately titled Forget Me Not and Forever Yours starring the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli. After that came a song from a much better-known film, “Smile” from Charlie Chaplin’s score for his last silent film, Modern Times (1936). Chaplin wrote the music for his own films with David Raksin, future composer of the big title theme from the film Laura (1944), as his assistant. Two British songwriters, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons, added lyrics to the theme in 1954 and created a beautiful ballad that was a hit for Nat “King” Cole. Though Chaplin didn’t have anything to do with the words, they express his philosophy of living life through adversity and maintaining a happy attitude. Il Volo’s concert featured a movie screen behind the singers that occasionally showed film clips, and for “Smile” they showed animated scenes of people who looked like Chaplin and Michael Jackson. For the next song, Agustín Lara’s “Granada,” the screen showed images of bullfighting even though the song itself is an ode to the charms of the Spanish city and has nothing to do with the corrida del toros. Their next song, “È Più to Penso” (“It’s More to Think”), was from a film score by Ennio Morricone adapted into a song by Mogol and Il Volo’s producer and manager, Tony Renis.

After that Piero Barone did a solo version of a song called “Non Ti Scordar di Me” (“Don’t Forget Me”), a title that’s been used for quite a few songs over the years, including the one that was Enrico Caruso’s first record, a cylinder for the Anglo-Italian Commerce Company in 1900. This “Non Ti Scordar di Me” is a relatively modern piece by Roberto Casalino and Tiziano Ferro. Then Il Volo got back together for the Spanish-language “El Reloj” (“The Clock”) and one of the oddest pieces they did all night, “Notte Stellata (The Swan),” based on the “Swan” movement from French classical composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals with Italian-language lyrics by Tony Renis. The next piece on the program was Gianluca Ginoble’s solo turn on a song called “Musica Proibita” (“Forbidden Music”), written by Stanislao Gastaldon for a 1942 Italian film of that title which starred the young Tito Gobbi (later a star baritone particularly known for his electrifying performances as the villain, Baron Scarpia, in Puccini’s Tosca alongside Maria Callas in the title role) as an aging composer who looks back on his youth and the misunderstanding that separated him from his girlfriend and condemned both of them to a life of loneliness and frustration. I first learned this song from Beniamino Gigli’s recording on an RCA Victor compilation album from 1962 called Great Tenors Sing Neapolitan Songs, and Ginoble’s voice and overall projection were hardly in the same league as Gigli’s, but he made it through the song acceptably.

After “This Time,” which came next, three of the next four pieces were from the traditional Italian song repertoire, with only an Italian-language version of Josh Groban’s hit (originally called “Solo Per Te” – “Only for You” – and on his 2006 album Awake) as “ringer.” One of the Italian songs was Cesare Bixio’s bathos-ridden “Mamma,” one was Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s “Mattinata” (Leoncavallo, composer of Pagliacci and a lot of other now-forgotten operas, was the first major composer to write a song specifically to be recorded; he wrote it for Enrico Caruso and the two recorded it together in Milan in 1904), and one was the inevitable “O Sole Mio” (“O My Sun”), which has gone down in history as the one song both of Victor Records’ most legendary artists, Enrico Caruso and Elvis Presley, recorded. (Elvis’s version was supplied with an English-language lyric as “It’s Now or Never.”) Alas, either Il Volo themselves or their music director decided to do the song in the original Italian but use the soft-rock arrangement of Elvis’s version. Early on in Il Volo … Takes Flight I joked to Charles that they were essentially an Italian boy band, albeit with at least somewhat better music. They’re still together with the same personnel, and at least according to the hyped-up bio on their Web site they’re going strong and are hugely popular, with Grammy-winning albums (the show was produced by Ken Ehrlich, who more than anyone else shaped the Grammy Awards into the overblown monstrosity they’ve become, with so-called “Grammy moments” that jam musicians of wildly different styles, talents and audiences together) galore and massive international tours, one of which was scheduled for 2020 but delayed by COVID-19. Il Volo … Takes Flight was actually an engaging video of what was undoubtedly a quite fun and entertaining concert, and as such was well worth watching.