Vittorio Grigolo

At thirteen he sang the Shepherd Boy in Tosca at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, in a performance whose Cavaradossi was Luciano Pavarotti. Born in Arezzo in 1977 and raised in Rome, Vittorio Grigolo had been taken at nine into the Schola Puerorum of the Sistine Chapel and spent five years there as a treble soloist. The adult voice proved to be a lyric tenor of unmistakably Italian cut, and the roles that suit it have carried the career since: Rodolfo, Alfredo, the Duke of Mantua, Nemorino, Faust, Werther, Cavaradossi. He made his Covent Garden debut in 2010 as Des Grieux in Massenet's Manon, and has sung at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala; in 2021 he added his first Manrico, in Barcelona. Beside the opera house runs a lighter public career — a Grammy in 2008 for a recording of West Side Story, and the Concert de Paris of 2013 before a crowd on the Champ de Mars that ran into the hundreds of thousands. He sang an Italian Night in front of the St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia on 28 August 2025, with Sonya Yoncheva and the Sofia Philharmonic.