REVIEW TTT covers wide range of musical genres

This Australian group will be featured on PBS stations in December.
By DEBORA SHAULIS
ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. -- It's not just any vocal group that can make the transition from an Italian opera to the theme song from a 1960s TV western.
That's what the Aussie assemblage known as The Ten Tenors did -- for an encore -- Friday night in Westminster College's Orr Auditorium.
Their musical diversity was a bit jarring at times, but the warmth, exuberance and lightheartedness of their performance smoothed things over.
If The modern-minded Ten Tenors (TTT for short) haven't grabbed your ear yet, it's only a matter of time. Their new recording, titled "Larger Than Life," reached United States retailers in September.
The group will be featured during PBS pledge drive segments in December; the concert that will be shown was filmed back home, in Brisbane, Australia. Friday was the beginning of a North American tour.
All members have had classical music training, although a few of them look like pop stars. Their performances are energetic, rather than static. With 10 voices, they execute some impressive crescendos.
Though most of the songs they performed Friday were covers, don't confuse TTT with a tribute band. The closest they came to that was when Jason Turnbull, a k a Chopper, mimicked Barry Gibb during a Bee Gees medley.
Group's approach
The best example of TTT's approach was in its performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody," by the 1970s rock band Queen. David Kidd, nicknamed Billy and the oldest of the Tenors at age 33, never tried to imitate the late Freddie Mercury, but he poured all of the emotion into his parts that Mercury did.
With a pianist and keyboard player as TTT's only accompanists, the singers substituted the guitar solos of Queen's Brian May with their own voices.
The Bee Gees medley was proof that their formal training hasn't made them too formal. They sang songs from the famous "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack, ending with "Staying Alive" and incorporating actor John Travolta's famous finger-pointing gestures into their choreography.
The Ten Tenors love medleys. They performed one of Beach Boys hits, another of Australian folk songs. They groups arias from famous operas -- "Faust," "Don Pasquale," and "Die Fledermaus" into a segment they called "opera without the boring bits."
End of concert
All joking was aside for their traditional encore number, "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's "Turandot." It was the Tenors' best operatic effort of the night, in terms of tonal purity and sincerity.
Then, for fun, they removed their suit coats and finished the evening with an animated version of the theme song from "Rawhide."
This was a fine start for Westminster's Celebrity Series and the first that most people have seen of Orr Auditorium since it was refurbished with a $1.7 million state grant.
Improvements were made to electrical equipment for lights and sound; the Tenors used new dressing rooms; and the audience relaxed amid new theater seats, carpeting and air conditioning.
shaulis@vindy.com