A classically trained pianist, the prodigious son of an opera singer father and a lover of '80s big-hair metal, Australian opera virtuoso David De Vito has lived a life blessed with music.
Gifted with perfect pitch, David’s love affair with music was ignited as a child. “At a very young age, my mother said as early as four or five years old, I used to listen to an ad, like the jingle on the television, and basically by ear replay that on our 100-year-old German piano,” David recalls.
David’s father was an opera singer popular in the local Adelaide area, but never achieved his dreams of international success, instead focussing on supporting his young family. However, he nurtured David’s gift, training him as a classical pianist and instilling a passionate drive for creating and performing beautiful, well-crafted music. “So my ear was probably developed before anything else; I love the discipline of classical music but when you have an ear for it, it sort of leaves you open to more interpretation of music, modern music, and as much as I love the classical music I've found it somewhat limiting when it comes to creating and adlibbing material.”
Raised and trained on the classical masters like Mozart and Bach, David may have had a musical upbringing that was second-to-none, but he soon discovered while playing a perfect Paganini gets you applause, it doesn’t exactly get you in with the ladies. “I moved out of classical in my mid-teens; I was still playing for my father but realising that the chicks I was going to school with weren't really digging classical piano, so I thought I really needed to broaden my horizons in that area,” he says with a hearty laugh.
“In my teens it was all '80s big-hair bands: Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Gun N Roses, and none of them sounded anything like me playing classical piano, so I soon learned that if I wanted to get chicks, I really needed to play guitar.”As David immersed himself in the sonic territories of 1970s and '80s heavy metal like Judas Priest, Megadeth and Iron Maiden, he quickly noticed distinct correlations and similarities between them and the classical composers he knew so well. “Bruce Dickinson is the lead singer of Iron Maiden and his voice is so operatic it’s not funny; it was almost like listening to heavy metal opera, which is kind of cool … it wasn't until I was in my mid-20s that I realised my gift, my niche, was having a really powerful voice and that it lent itself to opera; so I really came full circle and started doing more of the big voice, opera, John Farnham, Tom Jones sort of tunes, and playing guitar on the side.”
Combining his eclectic talents and tastes, David creates music that not only captures the power of his voice but also transcends genre with its blend of classical and contemporary sounds. “When people come to one of my concerts it's actually very little opera really,” David says.
“I do a couple of opera tunes, I usually open with one because it's so explosive and deep, and then it goes to a little fusion of music which is somewhere between pop and adult contemporary and I guess the influences I mentioned before which is of course all the classical stuff – a modern fusion of pop, blues and soul music.”
David will be performing at this year’s Jazz & Shiraz festival alongside James Morrison and Kate Ceberano. Audiences can expect a well-rounded show from David as he belts out the classics along with some of his own original material. “I’ve written a couple of jazz pieces, so there’s going to be a couple of originals on the day,” he says excitedly.
“It’s going to be definitely a collage of who I am as a singer; I may do a couple of opera tunes as a prelude which is what I did last year and seemed to go really well … the event’s going to be fantastic, if it’s anything like it was last time I’m really hanging out to be part of it.”
David De Vito performs at Jazz & Shiraz, 13 June.
