Jonas Kaufmann

Italians love to sing. They sing in the street, they sing while they go about their business. It is not just a cliché - in Italy, you see grown-up men just singing while they work, because they want to somehow express their feelings. Music is not only to make you smile, music is to make you think, and sometimes to understand that you're not the only one carrying great problems with you. By expressing that in a song you can better live with it, because somebody found the right words, the right way to express what you're feeling at that moment. The songs on this album show the whole range of emotions that italian music is capable of, just like in opera - but opera of course favours the dark moments. Here we have both darkness and light, and even in the darkest moment, the Italian finds a way to put a little bit of powdered sugar on top and to continue finding sweetness in life.