Andrea Bocelli: Love in Portofino is a concert filmed in 2013 on the little harbour square of Portofino, on the Italian Riviera. The Tuscan tenor, accompanied by orchestra, sings classics of international romantic song linked to his album Passione. The film weaves the songs together with images of the village and moments of intimacy, and shows the side of Bocelli closest to popular song.
Portofino is an old fishing village on the Ligurian coast, with a small square opening onto the harbour. There, in 2013, a stage was set up for a small-scale night-time concert, filmed for cinema and video.
The closeness of the audience, the lights on the water and the scale of the place give the film a climate quite different from the great stadiums where the tenor usually appears. This is a chamber Bocelli, in the kindest sense of the word.
The programme rests on Passione, the album of romantic songs Bocelli released that same year, produced by David Foster. It features Mediterranean and Latin classics, among them Love in Portofino, the song that gives the evening its title, alongside numbers as widely known as Bésame mucho.
It is a repertoire the singer has known since his piano bar years, when he earned his living singing songs of this kind, and that familiarity shows in the ease of the performances.
Born in 1958 in Lajatico, Tuscany, Bocelli lost his sight completely at the age of twelve. He studied law and earned his living as a piano bar singer, until a demo tape of his reached Luciano Pavarotti in the early 1990s.
In 1994 he won the newcomers' category at the Sanremo Festival, and the following year he introduced Con te partirò, which in its version with Sarah Brightman, Time to Say Goodbye, became one of the biggest-selling successes in European music. Since then he has taken his voice to theatres and stadiums across the world, with tens of millions of records sold.
Bocelli's career moves between two worlds: the operatic repertoire, which he has recorded and taken to the stage, and Italian and international popular song, through which he reached the wider public. Love in Portofino belongs squarely to the second, and is one of its most polished expressions.
A decade after its release, the film keeps its appeal: a singular place, an endearing repertoire and a performer who has made direct emotion his home ground.
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