Sogno

Sogno consists entirely of new compositions, much of which are deliberately skewed toward the pop audience whom Andrea Bocelli was well on his way to earning in the spring of 1999. In other words, it's an album that seems to be a progression, at least on the surface, but it's also a consolidation of the crossover audience that he wooed over the course of the late '90s. Sogno pulls off that trick, balancing Bocelli's opera background with modern pop and Italian music. That stance alone – finding a middle ground between classical and modern pop music – will alienate the purists (who, truth be told, haven't been all that thrilled with Bocelli in the first place), but this doesn't discredit the music.

This CD from the Real Compañía Ópera de Cámara presents two cantatas by the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler - Il Sogno and La Dora festeggiante. Il Sogno, written in 1787, is the only example of collaboration of between Martín y Soler and the great librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. These works are like a small fresco of this period of transformation. La Dora represents the end of a period, in which the Olympic gods serve as a model to human behavior, while Il Sogno, is, deep down, a pre-romantic spiritual work, in which the nymphs are no longer unattainable beings, beings that do not suffer or have human passions but on the contrary, they embody them, they live them in their own skin in spite of being in an idyllic place.

We have here the exception to the traditional "M 22" rule (M22 refers to the collection of complete Mozart operas taped by Deutsche Grammophon in Salzburg last summer, and now available on DVD) whereby regardless of the stage production, the musical quality remains very strong. In this "Sogno", it is the other way round. The production is smart, witty, transposed in the 1920s, and always ALWAYS keep the interest of the audience high…By Autonome