Italian singer Silvia Boreale performs in Karachi

She sang to a packed audience at Greenwich University, opening with the Pakistani national anthem

05 Jun, 2016

Italian singer Silvia Boreale, a petite woman with powerhouse vocals, performed to a packed audience at Greenwich University on Saturday evening.

She was one of the contestants in Amici, a popular TV show in Italy, and this was the first time she performed abroad.

Backed by a band mainly comprising university students, she opened her performance with the Pakistani national anthem and also sang ‘Sohni Dharti’. For the most part, her pronunciation was pretty good. Also she performed a mix of some of her originals ‘Pensiero stupendo’, ‘Margarita’, ‘Always’ and her hit number, ‘Gloria’ in Italian besides covers including ‘Stay’ by Rihanna and an English-Italian version of ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries.

Boreale poses with some university students —Photo courtesy: Silvia Boreale's official Facebook page

Although Italian is not a language widely understood in Pakistan, the students seemed to enjoy her performance. She told Dawn that she found the phonetics of how Italian was spoken in northern Italy similar to that of some words spoken in Urdu that made it easier for her to pick the language for the Urdu songs she performed. She said she found Pakistanis to be very welcoming and expressed a desire to perform here again.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2016

Comments

Zain - US Jun 05, 2016 04:07pm

Very nice and heartening to read about this. I have met some cool Italian people in the US who are very genuine and have strong family values like we Pakistanis do. The world is a small place. I like the way Italian language sounds, it has some similar vocal tones as Punjabi Language, particularly Pothohari Punjabi of Northern Punjab, my native language. I understand some Italian, as I have taken classes to learn Spanish in High School in America, which is very similar to Italian language as both have same Latin origin.

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Chris Roberts Jun 06, 2016 12:53am

So nice to see this kind of thing happening. So many exciting possibilities for Karachi to come alive and feature international world-class entertainment. An excellent way to bring the arts communities of various countries together. And regarding Zain - US' comments on language , the Germanic languages and the Romance (Latin) languages are Indo-European languages, a family of languages spread out from India to Europe, all having a common root that can be traced through Sanskrit. These languages and cultures are all distantly related. The study of linguistics reveals a lot about who we really are. Anyway, performances by artists such as Silvia Boreale may well whet Karachiites' appetite to discover and enjoy more of what the world has to offer.

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