Possibly the best-named person to come from Chigwell, and predictably called the “teenage Pavarotti”, Antoine rose to stardom through Britain’s Got Talent, the rare exception of someone with real talent appearing on the show.
Antoine has a fantastic tenor voice and on this album he sings a selection of popular classics, both old and new, from Puccini to Ennio Morricone. Antoine trained at the Royal Academy of Music after auditioning for a junior place at the four major music conservatories in London at the age of 14 and being offered a place at all four, so he’s good.
It’s not really our cup of tea, but he does it well, and even makes Un Giorno Per Noi — the music from Simon Bates’ Our Tune — sound fresh, which is some achievement. He covers Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and makes a decent fist of it, even though the opening moments sound like the Frozen soundtrack. Ave Maria also features.
His voice is pretty awesome; hopefully he can straddle the gap between being too pop for classicists and too classical for pop fans.
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