Amore is the eleventh studio album by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, released on 31 January 2006, for the Valentine's Day season. This album features a remake of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love"; "Because We Believe", the closing song of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which Bocelli wrote and performed; "Somos Novios (It's Impossible), a duet with American pop singer Christina Aguilera; and his first recording of Bésame Mucho, which eventually became one of his signature songs. Amore debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, which at the time was Bocelli's highest chart position in America yet. It went on to sell 1.66 million copies in the United States and was certified Platinum. Bocelli was the seventh best-selling artist of 2006, in the United States, and was also certified Gold and Platinum in several other counties.
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.
The young Swiss soprano Marie Lys was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the roles she has sung in George Frideric Handel’s works in recent years were written for the spectacularly virtuoso soprano Anna Maria Strada, Handel’s prima donna in the London of the 1730s. Accompanied by the Abchordis Ensemble and Andrea Buccarella, the group’s conductor and harpsichordist, Marie Lys decided to dedicate her first solo CD on Glossa to “La Stradina”, with an in-depth study of Anna Maria’s life on stage and the extraordinary vocal skills her roles demanded.
Andrea Gabrieli has always been something of a textbook composer, whose reputation falls under the shadow of his more famous nephew, Giovanni, the composer par excellence of the grand Venetian polychoral manner. Though Andrea's music may not plumb the depths of Giovanni's best pieces, his compositional range displays a versatility that the writing of his more considered relation surely lacks. Whereas Giovanni concentrated on liturgical composition, Andrea explored the gamut of contemporary styles and forms, from madrigals and lighter secular writing to dialect texts, church music, instrumental works, experimental theatre-pieces and music for Venetian festivities.
After a first recital devoted to the Toccata, Andrea Buccarella, winner of the MA Festival competition in Bruges in 2018, now presents an album devoted to the Fantasia. This album follows the same anthological principles as the first and includes both Italian and German compositions from the origins of the genre in Venice at the beginning of the 17th century to its apogee in the following century with Johann Sebastian Bach.