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Rating: The Avion Travel are a group with a thousand nuances.
Two in particular stand out above the others: the Neapolitan theatricality of the singer Peppe Servillo and the instrumental acrobatics of the (small) orchestra.
Now, notoriously, theatricality and technical virtuosity don't go well with the immediacy required by Italian pop music, to which this group, after all, belongs. So it's not surprising if such a creative group has sought to pursue artistic paths alternative to the traditional song form, more challenging but also more suitable to develop the enormous expressive potential that's still partly latent.
"La guerra vista dalla luna," a musical operetta in one act, allows the Caserta band to express at its best its two souls, the histrionic one and the acrobatic one. For this new artistic experience, Servillo & Co., with the valuable collaboration of Fabrizio Bentivoglio, take thematic inspiration from great medieval chivalric poems ("Orlando Furioso" above all), from which they nevertheless distance themselves, aiming to highlight the underlying merriment of the characters and the narrated story, at the expense of the epic solemnity that typically characterizes epic songs. A true parody of the genre, in short, transposed into a musical play.
The plot: Captain Manidoro-Fabrizio Bentivoglio and his faithful squire Gaetano, alias Peppe Servillo, are two (anti-)heroes of a war pitting Christians against Saracens. Fallen in battle practicing "the normal smuggling in war days" and having reached the afterlife, they ask to receive the same honors usually given to the fallen. The situation, in its paradoxical humor, then offers the cue for a series of ontological reflections on life and its pleasures, on death, on lost innocence, and, of course, on war, viewed mainly as an aberrant and destructive force.
A fundamental irony veils - making them acceptable - the considerations of the characters, giving them the trait of extemporaneity: it's as if they themselves, in their unaware clumsiness, invite the audience not to take them too seriously. Nothing of that continuously evolving life flow that is the universe can be crystallized in a judgment. Ergo, there are no absolute truths. This seems to be the final message, assuming there is one.
From a musical standpoint, the orchestral matrix manages to perfectly blend, as in the style of the Piccola Orchestra, the melodic taste of great Italian pop music, the Neapolitan musicality, perfect in emphasizing the most frenetic moments of the narration and the tragicomic character of the story and characters, as well as the finest world music and the now famous jazz nuances.
Special mention goes to the splendid acoustic guitar by Fausto Mesolella, a musician with a unique versatility, capable of ranging with disarming mastery from jazz to ethnic music (with a particular interest in arabesque musicality), to flamenco, to pop music. This album, in short, is recommended for those who love Avion Travel and want to see them work on something different, capable of truly exalting them.
On the other hand, classical opera enthusiasts might be better off skipping it, unless they're looking for something extremely light and carefree, that brings a smile from time to time. P.S. The rating is 3.5
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