About a month ago, my dear friend Valeria Bosch, whom you all know well by now, asked me for help in translating an article on Ignazio into English. For me it was a real pleasure and an honor, to translate Valeria’s beautiful and appropriate reflections. Surely many of you will have already read them, but I repeat them here again, in order to re-cheer your hearts.  💖

Enjoy the reading!
Daniela

IGNAZIO: the lights are dimmed on the stage, in the central cone only a young man dressed in dark, the sleeves of the shirt rolled up and a fashionable “gilet” (vest) of the past. For a few seconds he concentrates himself closing his eyes, then starts with the first notes of “Almeno tu nell’universo”, low, just whispered, to rise more and more, as the pathos of the music grows, in a conjunction between voice, music and text that captivates the viewer, keeps him suspended between earth and sky, in a region totally detached from reality and from matter. The passages of register, whispering, trembling, vibrating, acute, follow one another urgently, not as a mere demonstration of technical ability and artistic maturity, but as perfect emanations of the emotions of the mind and heart. At times a “divine violin” approaches him, it’s Alessandro, who, with pure magic, underlines, exalts, centuplicates the impact of the song on the public. 

IGNAZIO is like this: his relationship with music is symbiotic, when he closes his eyes and sings, leaves for distant lands, goes beyond the mountains and the sea, and takes you with him into his secret world, where you can abstract from everything, in those few minutes you lose the connection with time and space, to get a taste of that beauty and that perfection that has always been the man’s ultimate intent, an ethereal and impalpable world, but perhaps for this reason eternal and indestructible, the world of true music. 

IGNAZIO said it in the presentation: he chose the song, delivered to immortal memory by Mia Martini, because impressed by the story of this extraordinary singer, a sad and painful story, but at the same time full of greatness and genius. The text, by Bruno Lauzi, fits perfectly: in the eternal restlessness and discontent of human feelings (“people are crazy … when fashion changes … they change too”), the reference point can only be someone who can give sincerity (“tell me that you will always be sincere”), corresponding to ever-increasing love (“more, more, more”), as a promise of something finally lasting and indeed eternal (“you will not change … you will really love me, really more and more”). 

IGNAZIO was very courageous in choosing this solo, because the piece is linked in the collective memory to the unique and unforgettable Mia’s interpretation and therefore presented the risk of not being accepted by the public. But precisely for this reason he chose the way of not following the normal canons of a “cover”, but he made a real revisitation of it, focusing, more than on the intensely dramatic tone and on Mia’s tension, on a very modern interpretation (30 years passed since that 1989 in which the song was presented in Sanremo!!), made of fragments and continuous contrasts, deliberately disarticulated, marked by the intense passionate expression of the face and the beautiful hands that follow all the musical movements. 

IGNAZIO, I thought looking at him, has the suffered and passionate execution and “le physique du role” of a chansonnier of the golden age of the Parisian “boites de nuit” (nightclubs), where in the 50s and 60s of the last century was formed that new movement of unique musicians who sang the craft of living, the discontent, the breakup of an era, a movement that in Italy became that of songwriters, some of whom, Paoli, Guccini, de Gregori, Finardi, delight us even today. Certainly Ignazio does not sing his own texts, even though we know that he has already shown that is able to compose, doing it, and also successfully, for other interpreters; but that his empathy, so intense, in the sung notes, that deep and emotional expression of the face, his interpretation so authentic descends directly from those noble fathers who lit the musical nights of the past. 

Contemporary Italian music has an urgent need to revitalize itself and Ignazio, and with him, with absolutely equal ability and talent, his friends Gianluca and Piero, with their “Musica Tour” are really teaching everyone how this innovation can happen without breaking with the most genuine Italian tradition, without freakiness, without vulgarity, without pseudo-intellectualistic nonsense raps. It’s from them, from the young people of Il Volo, foolishly accused by brains without thickness to “make old music”, that is coming the proposal that will give new life to the Italian music scene. 

(Thanks to Danilo Video, for this wonderful video, “ALMENO TU NELL’UNIVERSO” – AT LEAST IN THE UNIVERSE, from the concert in Rome.)

Credit to owners of all photos and videos.