Biography of Andiamo

Claudio Catalano

It was not Claudio Catalano’s golden voice that initially made him a celebrity, but a talent Italians appreciate even more: his awesome ability to take corner kicks at soccer. Born in Naples, Italy, in the 1960’s, and growing up in Tuscany, Claudio studied to become a surveyor while playing midfield on a major league soccer team. When he left the world of sports, he became a real estate agent.

Claudio had always been a passionate lover of vocal music, but never seriously considered a career as a singer until he was vacationing in a Greek resort, where on a warm, Mediterranean evening he was invited to entertain an audience. His performance of pop songs was such a smash hit, that he started to look in the classified adds to find a teacher. He was lucky. “I fell into very, very good hands”, he smiles.

Realizing, as professional athletes do, that perfection is not merely based on talent but also on strict discipline, training, and practice, Claudio invested years of hard work to complement his natural gift with academic musical skills. While studying, he yearned to move away from pop, and into the more classical music genre. He started to participate in pop contests, but increasingly reworked the songs into a crossover style, electrifying his audiences. “That is when I began to smell blood”, says Claudio.

His breakthrough came in 1992, when he won an Italian TV song contest, and was subsequently asked to perform regularly on the popular Toto Cutugno show. His teacher kept insisting he should aim at opera. “I did not really want to do that”, he says, “because my heart was really in crossover.” But he gave in, and fell in love with Italy’s musical tradition by learning the opera, “Tosca,” which came “totally natural” to him.

Since 2001, he has performed various parts in traditional as well as modern operas in Milan, Rome, and other important Italian venues.
Performing in Andiamo, a tribute to traditional Neapolitan repertoire, the ultimate Italian version of classical crossover, is the fulfillment of Claudio Catalano’s biggest dream.

Paolo Fanale

As is frequently the case with prodigies, Paolo Fanale (1982, Palermo, Sicily) knew he had a musical gift before it was recognized by the people around him. As a child he never watched cartoons but devoured every bar of classical music on TV with a profound understanding of the structure of tone and sound. “I had an instinct to sing, but I can’t say anybody understood my talent”, he explains.

The first signs of his gift became apparent when he auditioned for a children’s choir, and was almost instantly selected to do solo parts. His music teacher understood his rare talent, trained him for nine years to play the piano, and began to prep his amazing voice for the opera stage. For almost two decades he worked closely together with the teacher’s young daughter, who became a renowned singer herself.

There was no money whatsoever in the Fanale family. Paolo’s mother left him, his father and his two brothers when he was very young. So at a quite early age Paolo began to work various jobs
in the summer in order to pay for music lessons during the school term. He does not blame his father for insisting the young genius would learn “a proper trade”. So, apart from his academic level in music, Paolo is the proud holder of a bookkeeping diploma. “My father may not be very cultural, but in all honesty he has always supported whatever I do”, he says.

In 2000, Paolo studied in Germany. Although German “lieder” were not his passion, over time he started to appreciate the beauty of Schubert’s and Schumann’s songs. A year later, he went to London for three months. Working as a bricklayer, he studied music, and tried his talent on the street. “As a Catholic, I even committed a serious sin by singing in a Protestant church, telling the priest I was a Protestant. But, hey, it paid fifty pounds”, he laughs.

In 2004 Paolo won several contests in Sicily and Bologna and has
been singing professionally ever since. He was recently offered a role in the opera world’s Mecca: Milan’s La Scala.

Giovanni Cavarretta

“He will turn every banana into a microphone”. That is how Giovanni Cavarretta’s mother described her uniquely talented son Gio (1969, Termini Imerese, Sicily), barely nine months old. Craving the arts, and particularly music, he started out as an electrician, fulfilling his father’s wish to “study something useful”. Out of engineering school, he left Sicily, bravely announcing he “would never come back”. First stop was Toronto, where he formed a rock band with two friends.

In 1988 he registered at the London School of Music, majoring in direction and design, and subsequently moved to Frankfurt, to continue his musical education. “It took me some time to get used to Germany”, he says. But he would soon embrace the country’s style and culture. Working part time as a foreman-electrician (glad he had leaned “something useful”), he initially took lessons with a baritone. In 1991 he auditioned for a very prestigious German conservatory, and was one of three talents selected for from a group of 120 applicants.

His spectacular and versatile talent as a singer – there is virtually no genre Gio cannot perform – did not go unnoticed. Renowned soprano Ingeborg Hallstein took him under her wings, focusing on the two genres he liked best: Neapolitan songs and German “lieder”. Calling her apprentice a “paradise bird”, she also encouraged him to take on other repertoire, and he began to perform in musicals, operas and “lieder” concerts.

In 1996 he broke his vow and returned to Italy to take lessons from a tenor. He was soon singing in several Mozart operas (Cosí fan Tutte, La finta Giardiniera and Die Zauberflöte). “Mozart was very young when he wrote these operas, and in fact the parts are not really written for the male voice”, Gio argues. But the parts trained his voice to perfection.

Gio gained celebrity status when In 1999 he started to appear regularly as a live guest singer on a popular RAI Uno television show. In 2002-2003 he appeared in music festivals in Naples, together, amongst others, with pop icon Dionne Warwick, and recorded his first pop record. With Andiamo he has arrived where he really wants to be: singing classical crossover.