How Three Italian Crossover Singers Launched Their Careers in 2011 with "Il Volo … First Flight"
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, May 18), my husband Charles and I watched an engaging classical-pops crossover concert video by an Italian singing trio called Il Volo (“The Flight”). The video was called Il Volo … Takes Flight (though there’s some uncertainty about the ellipsis in the title and whether it belongs there) and was an early live album from Detroit with the Detroit Symphony in 2011. Il Volo organized when its three members, tenors Ignazio Boschetto and Gianloca Ginoble and light baritone Piero Barone, met in 2009 when they separately entered a televised singing contest in Italy called Ti Lascio una Canzone (“I Bring You a Song”). Roberto Cenci, the show’s producer, had the idea of teaming them as a sort of younger version of the “Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras), who had created a sensation when they performed together for the 1990 opening ceremonies of the ...