Episiode Three: Piero’s Story

When we last saw Piero he was in the Choir of the Little Singers of the Philharmonic Association – Santa Cecilia of Agrigento. The time came for the change of voice, as happens with teenage boys, and this meant new decisions had to be made. All agreed his voice needed to be preserved so he had to step out of the choir. Rather than remain idle, Piero accepted singing engagements such as weddings where he would sing the Ave Maria and earn one hundred euro. He saved this money and when his mother needed something for the house he would say, “Here mom use this!” He learned the value of the dollar or should I say the euro at a young age and saved all his earnings. Piero’s always been a smart man when it comes to money. Just ask Ignazio and Gianluca. He handles their accounts. Or at least he used to!

Getting back to the story, when the change of voice finally happened, Piero moved on in his life.   One way to move forward was to enter competitions. Piero, in fact, participated in many singing competitions and won most.

Piero has a funny way of describing the competitions. Let’s listen to him describe it….

And then there were the cups. In Sicily when you win a festival, they give you huge cups, two meters by four, heavy, bigger than you.

Okay, let’s stop for a minute! If the size is 2 meters by 4 meters, that would mean the trophy was 6 ½ feet by 13 feet. I hope he brought along a truck to carry them home!

Piero continues….

But how did I start to perform at regional festivals? With the school! And here a great chapter opens up. In elementary school there were no music classes. So, I looked forward to middle school where there would be music lessons. On the first day of middle school professor Nisi called everyone in alphabetical order and made everyone sing. Our teacher wasn’t from Naro, so she didn’t know me. She had no idea I was a singer.  I really wasn’t looking forward to the first hour of music and getting up and singing. I was the second on the list. The professor calls “Baldacchino” and Baldacchino sings. Then she calls “Barone” and I sing Un Amore Così Grande, my battle horse from that afternoon under the carob tree in the garden of Riolo. In practice, from there I started, and I never stopped: with the schools there were musical reviews, and the music teacher brought me to make them all. I did the first Valledolmo festival singing Un Amore Così Grande again, and I finished third. I remember it like it was yesterday: I with a tuxedo, all classic, pulled.  After Valledolmo I went to Vallelunga, I won that festival and from then on, I won them all. Three years of middle school, three years of regional music festivals. Until it has arrived, the change of voice, between thirteen and fourteen and a half years.

So, what happened? When I resumed singing, I was in high school, an accounting school, and there’s no music, no music teacher and no festival. But is it possible that I could quit like that, to participate in festivals? My father took the situation into hand, and I started again. I won them all. One summer I took part in six festivals, and I won all six.  I sang La Voce Del Silenzio and Un Amore Così Grande, I arrived and all the guys who saw me already knew that I would ruin their evening.  I had a lot of fun, I accumulated cups – always two meters by four – and I was more and more convinced that if there was one thing I wanted to do in life, it was singing, Living For and With Music.

The festivals were wonderful, but Piero needed more. He needed to decide where his future lies. So first he needed to decide where he would go with that magnificent voice. It was already obvious that his voice was an opera singer’s voice but that is a difficult path to take. And the road is usually lined with many disappointments! But decisions had to be made and now was the time to make those decisions. What did Piero do? Let’s get back to his story to learn how he moved forward….

If I have to tell the truth, my project was to become a tenor and a singing teacher. Many opera singers have this double life because, unless you reach certain levels, you cannot live by singing alone.  

I always thought I would sing alone for the rest of my life. I imagined myself a tenor divided between theater and teaching. But before I got there the road was very long, and it was in the strict sense of the word. I went from Naro to Vittoria, where there was the master who had advised me to go to the teacher Bavaglio in Palermo. There was a two-hour drive in the first leg and as many in the return.

Having to travel to sing was not new to me, indeed for us, because I always traveled with dad.

Every Saturday my father took me to Agrigento to the rehearsals of the choir of Santa Cecilia, those afternoons were so beautiful. He sacrificed those afternoons he could have spent at the bar playing cards with his friends and he took me to Agrigento, a fifteen – twenty-minute drive from Naro.

I remember that we were following Series B because the time of the matches was the same as the choir rehearsals, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm, so I went to sing, and my father listened to the radio.

On the return of from Agrigento to Naro, we commented on the results and in the meantime we stopped at the Eurospin to do the shopping, at the shopping center ‘The swallows’ of Porto Empedocle, and we did shopping, but not clothes, no!  We were buying ham and food for the whole week. We came home with these three-meter receipts, and I was so happy. Going to Vittoria was a different matter. Yet when the teacher told me: ‘You must study in Vittoria,’ my father answered only: ‘Okay’ and changed the car to travel more comfortably.

At the first lesson we get to Vittoria, and I go to this baritone, all excited, and he makes me do the vocalizations and comments: ‘I expected more from you as the master Bavaglio spoke about it.’ I was really demoralized. But the goal was there, I wanted music to become my life and so, despite the disappointment, for four or five months I kept going to him. In the meantime, I continued my piano lessons. My first master Stefano Tesè could no longer come to Naro and had sent me to Canicattì from the master Pietro la Greca. He was young and good, I felt like I was with my contemporary and I was more motivated to study. Sometimes, since my father worked, my cousin Giuseppe took me to the teacher La Greca.

Before the baritone of Vittoria, for about two or three months, I had studied with a soprano from Caltanissetta. It was at that time that Giuseppe had begun to accompany me to singing lessons, when dad could not. So, my cousin took me to the teacher La Greca and on the way back I was given a ride by a boy from Naro who was studying the next hour after me. I waited for him to finish, and we would go home with his father.

So, it seems a plan is in place. Piero is traveling to his singing lessons. And it’s all going well and then one day everything changed….

What happens one day? Usually, as the boy who gave me a passage lived near my paternal grandmother, he always left me with him, where my father came to pick me up when he finished work. Only that evening my father was already at my grandmother’s and was talking on the phone.

“Who was that, dad?” Was the first thing I asked him when he finished speaking.

“Wait, let’s go home and I’ll tell you.”

It was strange that he was so mysterious with me, but I always trusted him blindly and if he said ‘after’ he meant that it was okay. I was curious, for sure, but I waited calmly. We finished dinner, and daddy keeps his promise and tells me: ‘On the phone was a lady, a certain Isabella Abiuso. She is part of the casting of Ti Lascio Una Canzone and she got your name from the Tour Music Fest.’

Now things are about to happen but wait, it was almost a missed chance! Piero almost walked away from his future. He was tired, he wanted to stop the competitions. But let me let Piero explain what happened. He tells it much better than I do….

Stop all and take a step back: what is the Tour Music Fest? It’s a festival that I did not want to do. It’s not that I was undecided, I wanted to think about it. No, I did not want to do it just because I won all these festivals, and I was a little tired. Yet it is a great European festival dedicated to emerging music born in 2003. It has several stages, runs throughout Italy and not just singers, but also bands and musicians participated.

The stage closest to us was that of Cosenza. ‘I have to drive,’ Dad had told me. ‘We have a comfortable car, you sleep, and we go, you do not even notice.’ Twenty-four hours to do Naro-Cosenza, Cosenza-Naro. We arrive there, I sing, and they do not give me more news. And they gave it to someone else.

But it doesn’t end there….

Isabella Abiuso, one of the talent scouts who selected children for the broadcast of Ti Lascio una Canzone, called the editors of the festival and asked for a name to try, someone interesting for that kind of television program. The organizers of the Tour Music Fest tell her, ‘Mrs. Abiuso, here there is nothing that we can give, apart from a certain Piero Barone, which for us has not gone well because it is not the kind of music that we deal with, but he certainly has an innate talent.’ I was not sixteen yet, it was November 2008. ‘Dad’ I immediately said, ‘this Ti Lascio Una Canzone, I’d like to do it. Let’s try, why not?’

The first edition of the show was very successful and the second was aired from April 4^th to May 30^th, 2009, every Saturday evening for a total of nine episodes. The director would once again be Roberto Cenci, as in the first edition, produced by Ballandi Multimedia, and the management would have always been entrusted to Antonella Clerici. My father thought about it and said: ‘Wait, let’s talk with the maestro to Vittoria.’

‘You are crazy,’ was the teacher’s answer. ‘You ruin him with these things because television takes the boys’ heads, it spoils the future.’

Possible? Before I was not good enough and now I could not do the audition because I could ruin the future? My father did not see this anymore. ‘No, I have to make him do it.’ But if you ask my father what he remembers about that audition, he certainly will not tell you about the master of Vittoria, but the first answer will be a number: 1280. These are the euros that he spent to buy two or three complete clothes in a very nice Naro store, because as a good Sicilian he said, ‘How? I do I bring my son to an audition at RAI, I have to make a good impression, no?’ I felt like a king with those clothes.

One thing we know, Piero can dance!

So, there you have it! Piero dressed like a king is on the road to via dei Gracchi where he will meet his destiny. His desire to Live For and With Music will be fulfilled but first, he must be accepted.

Next time we meet Piero at via dei Gracchi where he will come up against hundreds of young people looking for stardom. We know for sure he will be on a collision course with Ignazio and Gianluca but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We still need to get Ignazio and Gianluca into the mix.

Join me next week as I go back Through the Fields of My Mind and open the door to a new adventure!

Next week we witness Ignazio almost miss his opportunity at fame.

*What I have written here are excerpts from the book the guys wrote about their lives. “Il Volo, Un’avventura Straordinario, La Nostra Storia.” (An Extraordinary Adventure, Our Story) This is just a small piece of each mans’ story. The book is written in Italian. If you can read Italian, I would highly recommend that you read it. It’s wonderful! If not, I can only hope that someday it will be translated into English. Or you can use Google Translate to translate it.

I also recommend you read their second book “IL Volo: Quello Che Porto Nel Cuore” (What I Carry in My Heart).

Just in time for Christmas, a new EP release 4Xmas Amazing Grace, O Tannenbaum, Feliz Navidad and Happy Xmas (the War is Over) order yours on Spotify, Amazon, all media.

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