Friday night at 6:30 p.m., the ETSU Opera Theatre hosted an outdoor concert and their first Three Tenors Concert, “O Sole Mio”.

The ETSU Opera Theatre typically hosts two concerts a year, with one in each semester.

We, “did a full opera last year, written by a Canadian composer that’s still living actually, and it’s in English, and we’re going to be doing some operas in English in February that are actually both based in Appalachia. So, we usually do two performances in a year,” Karen Smith, opera director, explained.

The inspiration for the Three Tenors Concert was the very famous singing trio, The Three Tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, who were famous in the ’90s and 2000s. They did some of their big concerts at the Colosseum in Rome.

Photo of famous The Three Tenors singing trio. (Contributed/ivirtuosidelloperadiroma.com)

“This has been in the works for a couple of years, Mrs. Smith, our opera director kind of mentioned the idea of having us three tenors that were in opera at the time do something like this, and it is really cool that we finally got to do this, put on this big show at the amphitheater,” Joseph Smith, one of the tenors, shared.

“O Sole Mio” is a well-known Neapolitan song written in 1898 by Alfredo Mazzucchi and Eduardo di Capua. The song’s title, “O Sole Mio”, translates to “my sun” or “my sunshine.” The other songs that were sung Friday night varied from romantic to music from Les Misérables. The concert was hosted at the amphitheater by the Culp building.

“We wanted to perform it out here in a place where maybe people will be walking by and hear it and come and watch… it brings a music that they might not otherwise listen to something that’s diverse culturally from Appalachia something we thought would be really good for ETSU.” Joseph Smith shared.

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