Review: Il Divo deliver passionate, but cheesy show
  By Patrick Langston, The Ottawa Citizen May 21,  Singing group Il Divo performed at Scotiabank Place on May 20, 2012
.
And you thought Sunday afternoon was steamy. It didn’t hold a candle to the evening, at least inside Scotiabank Place.

Il Divo, the sizzling pop-opera crossover assembled eight years ago by television reality show judge Simon Cowell, could have thawed a hockey arena’s surface with their all-emoting-all-the-time performance of tunes like Te Amare (Come What May), Mama and Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Evita.

“Intense” doesn’t begin to describe these four lads who have sold over 25 million albums and sing in English, French, Italian and Spanish. With the dry ice machines working overtime and the rear stage screen flashing dramatic footage of flames and Renaissance cherubs, the four exude earnestness.

Impeccably coiffed and tailored, Il Divo consists of American David Miller, Swiss tenor Urs Bühler, French pop singer Sebastien Izambard, and Spanish baritone Carlos Marin. On Sunday, the kings of popera could do no wrong as far as their 6,500 or so fans, some of whom passed the singers a single red rose or chucked little teddy bears onto the stage, were concerned.

“How many beautiful ladies are here tonight?” one of them asked at one point. Cue laughter, applause and the follow up, “Oh wonderful, wonderful – I’m going to stay here all night.”

Unlike the singers and orchestra, most audience members – a pretty even mix of men and women, nearly all of us middle-aged - were dressed in casual summer wear. A few were decked out as though for, well, a night at the opera.

It was definitely not the opera, although an orchestra accompanied Il Divo, and each of the quartet can carry a tune and then some. The four proved their musical chops with songs like the hyper-romantic Every Time I Look at You and that old warhorse Unchained Melody (Senza Catene).

But it’s the “then some” in the tune-carrying that ignites the cranky gene in some listeners.

As cheesy as Pierre Poutine, the four seem hard-wired to be overwrought. Voices shoulder aside nuance in favor of the grand moment; hands reach out in slow motion to the audience time and again; sincerity reigns supreme, cluttering up even a song as ultimately simple as Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

It’s a style of course, one which Il Divo has down to a T. But it quickly gets tiresome, with one song soon sounding much like another. And really, how much emoting can the human heart stand in one night? 

Nikki Yanofsky, the 18-year-old jazz-pop sensation from Montreal, opened for Il Divo.

Self-possessed as all get-out when hurling her voice at the rafters – and that voice is a terrific instrument: clear, rich and experienced beyond her years – Yanofsky sounds oddly like an awkward 15-year-old when she addresses her audience.

At one point, Yanofsky invited us to dance in our seats as she rocked out on stage. We didn’t. Must have been the heat.