CREMONA – «Do I still play that piano that was delivered to my home by Gino Nazzari today? Yes, I played it last night too. It’s called Duysen and is very similar to Bechstein. I saw it dismantled for the first time in Mr. Gino’s laboratory.” Vinicio Capossela lights up when we ask him if the strings of that legendary piano continue to vibrate today. Many years ago now, the Duysen was developed and then delivered to the musician’s Milanese home by the historic Cremonese tuner himself.
«I remember Gino perfectly, a gentleman of incredible elegance, a man who came from the world where the beauty of music is located» continues Capossela, stroking his beard and losing himself a little in the memory. «It’s a nice plan, a little toothless. He has cracks in the keys and chubby legs, with some scratches. It inspired one of my songs, a love story between two pianos. It’s called ‘The Pianos of Lübeck’: in that piece I imagine a courtship between two instruments. A Duysen – thin and elegant just like Nazzari – and Mrs. Blutner, more shapely. It’s a plan I’m very fond of.”
The author of What is love, The dance of San Vito and Everywhere protect returns to the city tomorrow evening at 9pm for a concert at the Ponchielli theatre, a new stop on the tour With the keys we have, a tour of Italy, son of the latest album Thirteen urgent songs. He will do it with a band made up of Andrea Lamacchia on double bass, Piero Perelli on drums, Alessandro ‘Asso’ Stefana on guitar, Raffaele Tiseo on violin, Daniela Savoldi on cello and Michele Vignali on saxophone, two years after his last show at the auditorium of the Violin Museum. «The one at the Auditorium was a beautiful concert – he says -, designed for a string ensemble in a room with special acoustics. It was also the first time I played with Daniela, a musician also present in my latest album and in the group that will accompany me at Ponchielli: the first concert of a beautiful partnership that continues today.”
Speaking of the Thirteen urgent songs, closely linked to current events, and at the center of his latest recording effort dated 2023, Vinicio explains that “since then things have only gotten worse, so the reasons for the urgency are even more urgent”.
For the first time Caposselaalways the author of songs out of time or with an openly retro charm, he used a vocabulary unequivocally linked to the years we are living in, and he did so with a certain awareness: «I have always distanced myself a little from the dictatorship of current events, because the latter devours itself from moment to moment. But this is a problem that concerns politics more than songs. Politics should be a practice of setting the future. If, however, we find ourselves, both as an ‘audience’ of politics and as a political class, chasing the issues imposed at the moment from ten minutes to ten minutes, things end up getting old in a very short time. We are not talking about limited, museum-related themes, but about human themes that operate in social life with a permanent character. In another album of mine, Canzoni della Cupa, I referred to a world outside of history, of people linked to a cyclical time, a world that no longer exists, and which now emerges only in the form of scrap. So it’s not the song that gets old, rather it’s the world from which you choose to draw, to write and compose, that makes the difference. Culture, of which songs are also part, is above all entertainment. These songs are born from an attempt at involvement. An attempt that makes limits a possibility, facing reality with what you have.”
The keys, as the title of the tour states, may be few, but the collaborations that Vinicio wanted to record the album were numerous (among these Marc Ribot, John Convertino, Enrico Gabrielli, Bunna, Raiz and Cesare Malfatti): «It is a moment in which everyone is indignant, worried, suffers but in a very individual dimension. We live in a sort of collective individualism, perhaps also through technology. These songs have an ‘us’ at the center much more than an ‘I’, which is why it came natural to involve the most similar personalities in the creation of the album. They are collective issues, so it is natural to address them in a collective way.”
Tickets for the concert are on sale online and in the theater for the following orders: stalls (82 euros), central boxes (72 euros), side boxes (61 euros), numbered gallery (46 euros), numbered gallery (36 euros) , unnumbered gallery (30 euros), unnumbered gallery (30 euros).
