The legend of the desperation that would be the artist’s muse vanishes when she only appears on stage, on television, on the radio, as soon as she answers the phone and jokes: “Hello. Butcher Hannibal. How can we help you? ” For the musician “it’s time for heretics and improvisers, synonymous with creators”.
From Monday to Friday, Stefano Bollani airs every evening on Rai Tre at 8:20 pm, in a time slot usually dedicated to facts, information, politics and the obligation of seriousness. The miracle of “Via dei Matti number 0” – the program he leads together with his wife, Valentina Cenni – is that it talks about music, music and just music, but playing with the solemn monuments of the highest Western culture (Bach, Chopin, Mozart ), the myths of popular western culture (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Neapolitan song, Frank Zappa) and those of western culture and that’s it (the Beatles), without ever being tempted by the idea of telling the peaks reached by musicians by contrasting them with the abyss of some inevitable curse.
“The advantage I have”, says Stefano Bollani, “is that I take care not to do what I believe in: I do above all what excites me”. In his life he recorded thirty-four studio albums, seventeen live, signed ninety-six collaborations, played for a long time with his mentor Enrico Rava and experimented with musicians who push the sound to places so far away that they can be inhospitable. He offered his piano to the songs of Irene Grandi, Jovanotti, Elio and the tense stories, by Pavarotti. He has played everywhere, from the basements to the La Scala theater. He has an encyclopedic musical knowledge, which never becomes an academy. He approaches Rossini with Fabrizio De André. Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and George Martin’s Art of Recording. He talks about the diminished fifth and makes you feel that we all know very well what that demonic note is, playing a blues, a piece by Bernstein and also “How deep is the sea” by Lucio Dalla. Making people laugh with words is difficult. He succeeds in a prodigy: to make people laugh with notes.
“I have never played in the stage anguish party,” he says. “I have known musicians who suffer, even tremendously, the public. I, on the other hand, have always let myself go enough to play. In this, helped by improvisation training “. The metamorphosis that he fears most is that of fixity: being crystallized in a genre, in a piece, in an expression, in an attitude: a disaster that television however tends to encourage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFNWlgoQAV8
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