Gio Cavarretta
World
He will turn every fruit into a microphone”... That is how Gio Cavarretta’s mother described her uniquely talented son Gio (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. 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. Afterwards he auditioned for a very prestigious German Music University, 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. Some time after this period 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 he started to appear regularly as a live guest singer on a popular RAI Uno television show. In the same time he appeared in music festivals in Naples, together, amongst others, with pop icon Dionne Warwick, and recorded his first pop record. ...