San Siro 2007 (Deluxe Album) [Live]

Album Review

Laura Pausini's historic performance at Stadio San Siro in Milan, Italy, on June 2, 2007, was filmed for official release later in the year as San Siro 2007. Her second in-concert release in two years, preceded by Live in Paris 05 (2005), the CD/DVD is jam-packed with songs from throughout her career. While the two-hour-plus DVD includes 22 different tracks, six of these are medleys, adding up to 36 songs overall. (The audio-only version of the concert is shorter, jamming 27 songs onto a 80-minute CD.) The concert performance showcases Pausini's two most recent albums, Resta in Ascolto (2004) and Io Canto (2006), and includes a few surprises, most notably a multilingual medley of "Vivimi," a medley of "Y Mi Banda Toca el Rock," and Madonna's "La Isla Bonita," and a duet with Tiziano Ferro on "Non Me Lo So Spiegare." While the half-dozen medleys keep the show moving along at a brisk pace and help her jam as many of her hits into the set list as possible, it's sometimes frustrating to hear one of your favorite songs truncated for the sake of expediency. The same goes for her linguistic acrobatics. As impressive as it is to hear her switch between languages at ease during "Vivimi," it's frustrating to hear one of her all-time best songs adulterated. Moreover, the video cuts nauseatingly from shot to shot every 15 seconds, never focusing on any particular image (say, the featured singer!) for more than a fleeting moment — from a bird's-eye view of the stadium, to the fans, to a long shot of the stage, to a close-up of Pausini, to a panoramic view of the band, to another long shot of the stadium that emphasizes the ongoing rainstorm, and so on. Then again, the storm does inject a complicating variable into the performance that can't be appreciated in the audio-only version, as Pausini and her band carry on with their open-air stadium performance in spite of the steady rainfall (whereas many of the fans are armed with umbrellas). Despite some of these frustrations, there's plenty to enjoy on San Siro 2007, above all the performance of Pausini herself, who rises to the occasion and seems unconcerned with the rain, never losing her composure, even as she races through medley after medley. Relative to her other in-concert releases, which include the aforementioned CD/DVD Live in Paris 05 (a more intimate performance indoors from the Resta in Ascolto tour) as well as the DVD-only Live 2001-2002 World Tour (2003), San Siro 2007 is her least essential. Yet devoted fans will want it nonetheless, not only because of the career-spanning performance but also because of the excellent sound quality and because of its historic nature. Pausini was the first female solo artist to perform a sold-out concert at the world-famous soccer stadium, drawing over 70,000 fans for one memorable night.