KARACHI: 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.

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