Andrea Bocelli in Abu Dhabi, Thirty Years After Romanza

When Romanza was released internationally in 1997, Andrea Bocelli had already won over European audiences, but it was that album that definitively transformed his career. Thirty years later, the Tuscan tenor returns to that repertoire with a world tour that will stop at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Arena on 2 December 2026 as part of Yasalam Classics. Romanza was not strictly a new album, but a collection of songs recorded during the previous years. It did, however, contain the tracks that had built Bocelli’s early international success, beginning with Con te partirò and its duet version with Sarah Brightman, Time to Say Goodbye. The album also established a formula that would accompany the singer throughout the following decades: classical training and a tenor voice applied to a repertoire moving between opera, Italian song and pop. Born in Lajatico in 1958, Bocelli studied singing with Franco Corelli before making his breakthrough at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1994, winning the Newcomers section with Il mare calmo della sera. His recording success did not lead him away from the operatic repertoire. Over the course of his career, he has recorded works by Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni and Donizetti and worked with conductors including Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel and Seiji Ozawa, while continuing to release pop albums and collaborate with artists far removed from the classical tradition. It is in this overlap that the distinctive nature of his career can perhaps be found. Bocelli has brought operatic arias and the Italian repertoire to arenas and major international events, while songs conceived as pop music have become a permanent part of his concerts alongside classical works. The formula has enabled him to sell more than 90 million records and reach an audience that cannot easily be associated with a single musical genre. The Abu Dhabi concert therefore returns to Romanza as a way of measuring the distance travelled since then. The Etihad Arena date falls on 2 December, the UAE’s National Day, and brings Bocelli back to the Emirati capital as part of a tour built around the 30th anniversary of the album that established him as an international star.