Under The Desert Sky ［CD+DVD］

Billed as the first pop concert performance in Andrea Bocelli's career, the show anthologized on Under the Desert Sky was taped at the Lake Las Vegas Resort and featured an elaborate stage production from David Foster and Humberto Gatica, the pair who made a crossover hit out of Bocelli's 2006 album Amore. It's packaged as a CD/DVD combo, with a peculiar emphasis on the DVD side, since it includes more than twice as many songs as the CD. The audio portion has only five songs from the concert, plus four studio duets that are leftovers from the Amore sessions (one is actually an edited version of a song that did appear, Stevie Wonder's "Canzoni Stonate"). The highlight of the duets is unquestionably "The Prayer," which Foster wrote with Carole Bayer Sager for the movie Quest for Camelot. Bocelli's vocal partner, Heather Headley, proves a great match and their harmonies reach a peak that's barely equaled even on the Amore album (she is a Tony winner, after all). The DVD portion includes 18 performances from the concert Under the Desert Sky, plus interviews with Bocelli, Foster, and Gatica on the making of Amore, a photo gallery, and a featurette on Lake Las Vegas. ~ John Bush