Sogno consists entirely of new compositions, much of which are deliberately skewed toward the
pop audience whom
Andrea Bocelli was well on his way to earning in the spring of 1999. In other words, it's an album that seems to be a progression, at least on the surface, but it's also a consolidation of the crossover audience that he wooed over the course of the late '90s.
Sogno pulls off that trick, balancing
Bocelli's
opera background with modern
pop and Italian music. That stance alone -- finding a middle ground between
classical and modern
pop music -- will alienate the purists (who, truth be told, haven't been all that thrilled with
Bocelli in the first place), but this doesn't discredit the music. True, there are moments on
Sogno that don't work as well as others, but overall it flows nicely and maintains a fine balance between pieces that suggest
opera without actually being
opera, and
adult contemporary songs such as
"Nel Cuore Lei" (a duet with
Eros Ramazzotti) or the
Celine Dion duet
"The Prayer," which was originally featured on the soundtrack for
The Quest for Camelot. The most interesting moments are songs like
"Come Un Fiume Tu," a collaboration with
Ennio Morricone that manages to not only find a middle ground between those two extremes, but to push forward, as well. Songs like these keep
Sogno fascinating, but it's the
adult contemporary-flavored numbers that stand to bring in a larger,
pop-oriented audience, who will then likely explore the rest of
Bocelli's catalog. For skeptics, however, the very presence of
pop-leaning numbers will confirm their doubts. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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