An Easter Sunday online performance by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli will raise awareness for his foundation’s emergency COVID-19 campaign to help hospitals purchase instrumentation and equipment necessary to protect their medical staff.
The Andrea Bocelli Foundation was launched in July 2011 to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, distress due to illness, and social exclusion by promoting and supporting national and international projects that promote the overcoming of these barriers and the expression of their full potential.
“I strongly believe that love does justice,” Bocelli says on the website. “And it is for this simple reason that we are all responsible for building a better world.
“Since love energizes faith, the opposite must also be true. The amazing lives we have been gifted offer us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give the less fortunate a better future and opportunities.”
Bocelli, who’s been blind since he was 12, is a 61-year-old opera singer, songwriter and music producer whose albums have combined to sell more than 90 million copies around the world since 1994. He’s performed around the globe and collaborated with the likes of Celine Dion, Sarah Brightman, Natalie Cole, Jennifer Lopez, Nelly Furtado, Ariana Grande, Nicole Scherzinger, Ed Sheeran and Zucchero.
With that kind of stature, having Bocelli’s name attached to the foundation is important in raising funds and awareness while opening doors to get things done on the various projects it’s been involved with over the years.
The foundation’s emergency COVID-19 campaign has a GoFundMe page that, as of April 8, had raised approximately $205,000 of its approximately $230,000 goal.
Bocelli’s Easter Sunday performance will take place at the historic Duomo cathedral in Milan, a city in Italy’s Lombardy region that has been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 virus, with more than 53,000 confirmed cases and almost 10,000 deaths as of April 8.
Bocelli will be accompanied only by cathedral organist Emanuele Vianelli on one of world's largest pipe organs. There will be no audience in the closed-to-the-public Duomo, in compliance with government regulations on COVID-19, but the concert will be streamed live on Bocelli’s YouTube channel at 1 p.m. EST.
“Thanks to music, streamed live, bringing together millions of clasped hands everywhere in the world, we will hug this wounded Earth's pulsing heart, this wonderful international forge that is reason for Italian pride,” Bocelli said in a media release.
“The generous, courageous, proactive Milan and the whole of Italy will be again, and very soon, a winning model, engine of a renaissance that we all hope for. It will be a joy to witness it, in the Duomo, during the Easter celebration which evokes the mystery of birth and rebirth."
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