The Ten Tenors – Double Platinum

 The Ten Tenors are touring to promote their new CD, Double Platinum but it seems like for them, this is the rule rather than the exception – touring that is. 

 Presented by: The Ten TenorsVenue: Sydney Opera House Wednesday 31 August, 2011

The Ten Tenors are touring to promote their new CD, Double Platinum but it seems like for them, this is the rule rather than the exception – touring that is. The programme tells us how the CD took two years; three continents and six countries from conception to reality and anecdotes in between sets regaled the audience with stories of travel.  It’s a nice life: Touring and singing in many of the best venues around the world, the Sydney Opera House included. However, in a venue like the Opera House some of the grandeur of this performance may have been lost; ironic in a group that fuses opera with pop and rock but understandable if one knows the peccadillos of sound in the Opera House concert hall. 
The songs are beautifully arranged, the voices blend perfectly and the sound is velvety and strong and in some respects it would have been nice if these things were sometimes left to be themselves. Stand out performances come from Boyd Owen who had one of the strongest voices and clearly can hold the stage with just a note, Stewart Morris is another longer serving member of the ensemble and is personable and utterly entrancing while singing and speaking.Two young members of the group, Keane Fletcher and Jordan S Pollard, work well and stand out both as a duo and on their own. The group works as a whole and in a repertoire that runs the gamut from ‘Nessun Dorma’ to Meatloaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything For Love’, ‘Bring Him Home’ from Les Mis to Leonard Cohan’s ‘Hallelujah’.
It is a difficult thing to pull off singing a ‘solo’ as a group of ten, and some of the emotional intensity is occasionally lost, even if the sound is beautiful. I’ll admit I found myself wondering why, instead of ‘Bring Him Home’ we couldn’t hear ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’ to give us a sense of individual characters within a group. Here is the challenge of a show like this – to create the sense of the individual within the rich sound of a group. The other challenge is to create a sound balance that can apply to such a wide range of styles. Perhaps it would be best to pare back the classical repertoire to just the instruments and voice and use the backing, main event lighting and choreography for Meatloaf, because, boy does that work a treat.
All in all, it is a fun night out – just the right mix of class and rock and cheesy goodness that will transfer even better to the regional and out of city venues it heads to on this tour. Beside the aforementioned Boyd Owen, Stewart Morris, Jordan S Pollard and Keane Fletcher – Thomas David Birch, Graham Foote, Paul Gelsumini, Dion Molinas, Jarred Newall and Ben Stephens make up the phenomena known as The Ten Tenors.