Andrea Bocelli Sì

Cieli di Toscana (Tuscan Skies) is Andrea Bocelli's eighth studio album, released in 2001. Cieli di Toscana sold millions of copies in a few weeks after its release, and quickly become the biggest selling album in the world in 2001, No. 1 on the CNN Worldbeat Global Album Chart. In the United States, the album peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 chart, with 85,000 units sold in its first week, and blew through 177,000 copies over Christmas week of 2001, Bocelli's best sales week in America, at the time. That record stood for the following 8 years, until My Christmas, Bocelli's first Holiday album, was released in late 2009 and achieved better sales weeks.

What a pleasant surprise that this recording of Carmen, that, on the basis of its packaging looks like it was intended to be essentially a showcase for Andrea Bocelli, is an entirely respectable version of the opera. Much of the credit goes to Myung-Whun Chung, who leads Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France in an exceptionally brisk account of the score, starting with a prelude that's bracingly impetuous, but he can be languidly flexible when the music calls for it. He uses a sort of hybrid version of the score, with some of the spoken dialogue and some of Guiraud's recitatives, and it works just fine.