Andrea Bocelli - Sogno (K2HD Mastering) (2013)

This recording has been mastered by the K2 HD format of 24-bit 100kHz, which creates an unbelievable sound surpassing other formats!

Sogno is the fifth studio album by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. The album sold 2.5 million copies in America, and over 10 million copies worldwide. Bocelli was subsequently nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys, the first and so far only time a classical artist had been nominated in the category since 1961. Sogno was released internationally on April 6, 1999.

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.