Albano Carrisi

Yes, of course it's embarassing to include Albano Carrisi in a tenor encyclopedia. Albano Carrisi, that's the guy who became famous as Al Bano, of "Felicità" fame and Romina Power affiliations...
But giving it a second thought, he was labelled a new Claudio Villa when he was young, and to a certain extent, he shared Villa's unaccomplished ambitions re classical music – every now and then, he would record the odd aria or symphony snippet (though always in arrangements that have to be heard to be believed), and later in his career, he would make a few CDs exclusively dedicated to such "creative" renderings of classical music, and use his real name, Albano Carrisi, for those CDs – a proof that the ambition was more serious than the results! At the time, the German Wikipedia had a Nessun dorma entry that mentioned only three singers supposedly famous for their renditions: inevitably Pavarotti, then a certain Paul Potts (who the hell is Paul Potts?? the winner of the TV show "Britain has talent" in 2006), and Albano Carrisi...
While Carrisi's musical, ahem, taste and style certainly prevented him from achieving anything fruitful in the classical field, his voice was admittedly not that bad. In that late stage of his career, he even sang live in an operetta concert (with a classical orchestra, no "creative" arrangements, for once!) in Bad Ischl/Austria, with José Carreras, Eva Lind, and Thomas Hampson, and he had a bigger voice than Hampson and proved a better tenor than Carreras (I know, it's not difficult, and no, he didn't prove a good tenor – just better than Carreras). Hadn't he chosen to earn much money as a pop singer, he would have ended up singing Radames and Calaf in Vercelli, Sassuolo or Reggio Calabria.

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