THE TEACHER
twelve o’clock, May 19, 2021 – 12:21 pm
You begin to frequent Puglia already in the early seventies, at the time of avant-garde experiments. He had produced the album The Picture of You by Radiodervish
of Francesco Mazzotta
In Puglia, a land of crossroads of ancient cultures, he breathed the air of his Sicily, assure those who knew him well. And Franco Battiato himself said that here, where the gateway between East and West ideally stands, it was even easier for him to feel like a Central European Arab. This is what Paolo Scarnecchia had defined, author many years ago of a significant book on the musician from Catania, the ascetic of music who died yesterday at the age of 76 after breaking down the barriers between pop and cultured tradition. Maybe now he will be walking somewhere in the company of Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky, imagining himself on Nevsky Prospekt, if indeed there is somewhere else. Or maybe he will have taken the form of some other special being, he who in his reflections managed to hold together Buddhism, Christianity and quantum physics.
Reincarnation
Battiato claimed to have already reincarnated three times. And I reaffirmed it in Bari, in 2014, during a meeting organized by Michele Lobaccaro of Radiodervish, the Italian-Palestinian group built around Nabil’s voice. A formation in which the sonorous echoes of the Sicilian singer-songwriter have always resonated very strongly. Of Radiodervish Battiato had produced the album Immagine di te and directed the video clip Amara Terra Mia, a tribute to Modugno shot in Salento. Filming took place between Otranto and Melpignano, where in 2004 Antonio Princigalli, manager of Radiodervish at the time, had brought Battiato to the stage of the Notte della Taranta for a reinterpretation of two classics of popular tradition, Quannu te lai la faces and Damme la manu. . And Princigalli, who wanted Battiato for an author meeting at the first edition of Medimex, still remembers the rush to the hospital in 2015 after his fall on the Petruzzelli stage, which cost the artist a broken femur. It was one of his last appearances in Puglia, a land that the artist had begun to frequent already in the early seventies, at the time of the avant-garde experiments of Fetus, Pollution, Egypt before the sands and the hypnotic piece of electronic music Propriedad prohibida .
Among the many concerts of the last decade we remember that of Barletta with Nabil, of Lecce and Bari with the philosopher narrator Manlio Sgalambro, the two of Taranto, one for the Amici della Musica at the Orfeo Theater, the other for the Apulian public theater on the Rotonda del Lungomare. And, then, the already mentioned and unfortunate performance at the Petruzzelli, in addition to the performance in the Castellana Caves in 2017, the year of farewell to the scenes. Battiato had an admiration for the Molfetta rapper Caparezza. And he confessed it in 2011 during the Frontiere review organized by the Apulia Film Commission, invited to present the docufilm on the Sicilian writer Gesualdo Bufalino. But the Apulian musician he usually attended was the concert player Francesco Libetta, for whom he supervised the nineteenth century musical on the Turkish invasion of Otranto with the choreography of Fredy Franzutti. If the passage of time is measured by the voids, the latter really makes an impression, comments the pianist from Salento, who had appeared in the film Musikanten on the life of Beethoven and should have been Scarlatti alongside Willem Dafoe in another biopic of Battiato on Hndel . Directing was another passion of his.
Once he called me from Tibet to tell me that he was shooting a documentary on reincarnation, but he could keep me on the phone for hours to find out the fingering of the Pathetic, says the musician from Lecce, who with the Amici della Musica di Taranto will soon celebrate the master by playing two compositions. originals inspired by his songs, one for trio and the other for small ensemble. And the monographic concert on Battiato that Emanuele Arciuli had planned for the end of August as part of the Bari Piano Festival, a tribute to an artist without labels, is charged with even stronger meanings.
May 19, 2021 | 12:21
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