The best of Andrea Bocelli

If you are an Andrea Bocelli fan, then there is a strong chance that you already have copies of most of the cuts in his new album Vivere. There is Time to Say Goodbye a duet with Sarah Brightman of his breakthrough hit Con Te Partiro, from Romanza. Il Mare Calmo Della Sera, Vivo Per Lei, a duet with Georgia and Romanza are also from the same album. So does the title track, but this was then a duet with Geradina Trovato and is now presented as Dare to Live which translates into Vivere in English, as a duet with another Italian pop star, Laura Pausini.

The songs Sogno, Canto Della Terra and the wildly popular The Prayer with Celine Dion from the movie Quest for Camelot are from the album Sogno. The Spanish standard Besame Mucho and the David Foster composition Because We Believe come from Amore. Melodramma and Mille Lune Mille Onde are from his last release Cieli di Toscana. All these hits come together in Vivere because this is Bocelli’s first ever greatest hits collection.

Often referred to as the “fourth tenor” in deference to the first three, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, Bocelli is generally credited with giving a pop image to classical singing. If you will listen to Vivere you will surely notice the distinct rock tones in his first big seller Time to Say Goodbye. The success of the song laid the groundwork for the acceptance of opera into the hit charts and the birth of what is now called popera. The new style was later also picked up successfully by Josh Groban but it started and remains the domain of Bocelli.

And again as you will also notice, Bocelli has been most fortunate in being able to record some of the most beautiful songs ever written. You know how you can get two or three standouts in one good album but this one has the great songs coming one after the other in this album. So you can count on getting exactly the best of Bocelli when you get Vivere.

And the CD is not all that. It also has new recordings, namely La Voce del Silenzio, Bocelli’s own composition A Te featuring Kenny G on the soprano sax, Bellissime Stelle, and the most beautiful of them all, Io Ci Sara a collaboration among Foster, Bocelli, Eugenio Finardi and Walter Afanasieff, which features classical pianist Lang Lang.

Admittedly, Bocelli is not on the same level as the three tenors in terms of opera prowess. He is also often accused of being too pop and often careless with his singing. But it is also a fact that the public simply adores him and could not care less about his so-called faults. Besides, as you will surely notice in Vivere, Bocelli now sings with clearer, fuller and more relaxed tones in the later recordings from Cieli Di Tuscana and the album’s new cuts.

Vivere has already joined the ranks of big selling albums in the US. It is now in Billboard’s Top 200 Albums in retail sales and is expected to do as well in other countries around the world. His earlier releases have after all mostly gone the multi-platinum mark and he has already sold over 50 million albums worldwide. Vivere is one CD that all those buyers would not want to miss.

The Top 10 titles in the albums’ chart are: Long Road Out of Eden by the Eagles; Blackout by Britney Spears; Carnival Ride by Carrie Underwood; Avenged Sevenfold by Avenged Sevenfold; Everything is Fine by Josh Turner; Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss; Unbreakable by the Backstreet Boys; Noel by Josh Groban; Vivere: The Best of Andrea Bocelli; and Still Feels Good by Rascal Flatts.

Reader’s feedback

From the mail: Adamson Cui of Malate, Manila wants to know why I keep putting out the Billboard hit lists but not the local hit charts. Thanks for writing Adamson. I would love very much to put out the local hit lists but I am unable to because there is none available. Music stores, distributors, producers, etc. etc. hereabouts seem to be very secretive about sales figures. They have been for many years so there is really no reliable listing around.

While I do have an idea about what is selling big, a hit list will be mostly guesswork. As for those tabulations on the radio or on TV, those are mostly based on text votes. You want your song to be a hit? Load up your phone and text away. There is nothing credible about that. So unless we get our own version of Soundscan soon, which records every sales transaction automatically, we just have to rely on heresay for the local hits.