If Urs Buhler had his way, his group's next CD might be more Dio than Divo.
"Personally, I would love to make a heavy metal album," proclaims the 37-year-old Swiss tenor from popera sensations Il Divo.
"I've got two kinds of music I listen to predominantly. One is opera, obviously, because I'm an opera singer. And the other is hard rock and heavy metal from the '80s and the early '90s. Because that's what I listened to when I was a teenager. I was the lead singer in a heavy metal band.
"I always thought that heavy metal and hard rock come closest to opera, because of the pure energy of the singing and the arrangements. You've got the guitar shredding with the high violin strings and the distorted guitars in the low strings. I think it would be easy, actually, to make a symbiosis of this."
But don't worry, fans. After selling 22 million copies of their four albums, Buhler and his bandmates -- Frenchman Sebastien Izambard, American David Miller and Spaniard Carlos Marin -- know how their bread is buttered. So they aren't about to don leather codpieces and breathe fire anytime soon.
"I think that would be the last Il Divo gig our fans ever came to," he laughs, relaxing briefly in a Paris hotel before heading off to a photo shoot. "No, I don't think that's ever going to happen. There are other bands who do that kind of thing. We are more on the loving and romantic street."
But that hasn't stopped them from raising the bar in concert.
Il Divo's current tour, which crosses much of Canada over the month of May, with a stop at the Air Canada Centre May 5, seems designed to put more pop into their popera equation -- it was created with the help of Kylie Minogue's creative director William Baker and former musical director Andrew Small.
"The whole tour is just really a big step up on anything we've done before," claims Buhler, explaining the quartet's new stage setup includes runways and a satellite stage that gives them greater mobility and contact with fans.
"With the stage design, we take the audience through the mood changes of a two-and-a half-hour show.
"The great thing for me as a performer is that this stage gives you somewhere else to walk instead of just going from left to right on a normal stage. On this stage, we can really move around without it looking contrived. It feels very natural to perform on this stage."
Their 150-minute set also includes new material, he says.
"I'm not going to tell you what we're doing, of course. But it's the first time we've managed to do that. Previous tours, we had very little time for rehearsals. This time we tried to eliminate that kind of beginner's mistake. So we took a good two or three weeks to rehearse this show purely from a musical standpoint. And we've arranged a couple of new songs that we had in mind for a long time."
Some of those songs will likely end up on the Armani-clad ensemble's upcoming fifth album, which is still in the planning stages, he says.
"We're thinking very strongly about that, but it gets harder and harder, really, to find good repertoire," he reveals.
"In the past we came up with individual songs and we would go into the studio with those 15 or 20 songs and come out with the best 12 and they went on an album. Now, we plan to make ... well, I can't say it's a concept album, but we want to find the idea of what kind of music we want to put on this album and then go out and actually look for the songs.
"We don't want to just keep repeating ourselves. We want to expand and explore new ground; see how far can we go with the three opera singers and the pop singer and the way we arrange songs vocally and make them our own. There's still a lot of ground to be covered."
As long as that ground doesn't include any hard rock, that is.
Il Divo no longer has to do what Simon says
Are they not their own men?
They are Il Divo.
Although the international popera quartet was first brought together by American Idol judge and musical entrepreneur Simon Cowell as a more commercial response to The Three Tenors, the foursome have long since taken over the reins of their career, says tenor Urs Buhler.
"We hardly deal with Mr. Simon Cowell," he says.
"We have hardly anything to do with him. We see him once a year for a half-hour meeting to discuss the repertoire for the next album.
"That's about it. He has nothing whatsoever to do with the tour or the set list. We decide about that. We have meetings and conference calls with the creative people; Simon Cowell has nothing to do with that."
And even if he did, the four members of Il Divo have now bonded enough to stand together as a unit.
"We reached that point some time ago," Buhler says.
"Also, I think to be quite frank, that whole bonding thing is quite overestimated. You see bands who have been together since school times and played in a cellar for 10 years, and all of a sudden they get successful, and they get sick of each other so quickly that they often fall apart.
"But we came together at a mature age, and have had our own careers and know what we're talking about and what we're doing.
"And along the way we got to know each other.
"Sure, in the beginning, we had a lot of misunderstandings, especially as we're from four different countries and speak four different languages. And those kind of things, you just have to work through them.
"And we did.
"We're adults."
