Get To Know Il Divo

With just days to go to their midsummer’s night open air concert at Musgrave Park, we profile the operatic pop vocal group who have sold over 26 million records worldwide.

The group is comprised of four male singers; French pop singer Sébastien Izambard, Spanish baritone Carlos Marín, American tenor David Miller, and Swiss tenor Urs Bühler.

Created and managed by music mogul Simon Cowell, the idea behind the group’s creation came to Cowell after hearing Andrea Bocelli sing ‘Con te Partirò’ in an episode of The Sopranos. Following on from the popularity of operatic male group G4 in an early series of the X Factor, Cowell identified an untapped market for lyrical voices and classical music, and decided to form a multinational quartet that recreated the style of The Three Tenors, conducting a worldwide search for singers which lasted two years – from 2001 to 2003.

Since then Il Divo have become one of the biggest selling and touring groups in the world, generating $92.5 million in gross sales, performing at the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and collaborating with the likes of Celine Dion, Barbara Streisand and Katherine Jenkins along the way.

Now, to celebrate their 10th Anniversary, the quartet have embarked on a new musical journey, paying homage to the songs of Broadway in a new album and tour entitled "A Musical Affair".

Tenor in the group Urs Bühler explains his diverse singing background, and how he’s relishing the challenge of the quartet’s latest project,

"It feels like we're going to dive in a completely different world of music. I've been a singer in a rock band, which is one world and then I made the move into the classical, and then with Il Divo I combined the two and moved into the pop business.

"But now we're going to Broadway, which is somehow a different format again. Getting in touch with this whole world of music is out of my comfort zone, so it is exciting and challenging."

Fellow tenor David Miller explains how the group like to constantly reinvent themselves and push out their boundaries,

"The thing that Il Divo brings to music in general is being outside the box and revamping something that people are already very familiar with."

"For instance, with 'Unbreak my Heart', we put it in a different language, so that gave it a layer of distance from the version everyone knows. It was men singing it, which was another layer; and then it was multiple voices, which is another layer. It goes further and further out of the box, but with a melody that everybody is familiar with – so when they first hear it, they're not sure why they know this piece of music already. It's as if they're hearing it for the first time. At a certain moment, the light bulb goes off, and they realise why it's familiar. It shows that although music can get codified, it really has no boundaries in the way it can be interpreted and reinterpreted and reconfigured, and still have a huge impact."

Il Divo are accompanied by the City of Cork Symphony Orchestra for “A Musical Affair” this Saturday at Musgrave Park with gates opening at 5pm.

Over 14,000 are expected to visit the stadium with a limited number of tickets still available to purchase online by clicking here.

For those who can’t wait till Saturday to sing along, check out some of their official videos by clicking here.