Il Divo raises the bar


If Urs Buhler had his way, his group's next CD might be more Dio than Divo.

"Personally, I would love to make a heavy metal album," proclaims the 37-year-old Swiss tenor from popera sensations Il Divo. "I've got two kinds of music I listen to predominantly. One is opera, obviously, because I'm an opera singer. And the other is hard rock and heavy metal from the '80s and the early '90s. Because that's what I listened to when I was a teenager. I was the lead singer in a heavy metal band."

"I always thought that heavy metal and hard rock come closest to opera, because of the pure energy of the singing and the arrangements. You've got the guitar shredding with the high violin strings and the distorted guitars in the low strings. I think it would be easy, actually, to make a symbiosis of this."

But don't worry, fans. After selling 22 million copies of their four albums, Buhler and his bandmates -- Frenchman Sebastien Izambard, American David Miller and Spaniard Carlos Marin -- know how their bread is buttered. So they aren't about to don leather codpieces and breathe fire anytime soon.

"I think that would be the last Il Divo gig our fans ever came to," he laughs, relaxing briefly in a Paris hotel before heading off to a photo shoot. "No, I don't think that's ever going to happen. There are other bands who do that kind of thing. We are more on the loving and romantic street."

And the link to the interview:

http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/Entertainment/mu...256296-sun.html