coolermaster

What I frankly don't understand is the media "hype" surrounding the replacement of D'Orazio with Ferrone, only to produce a record like this... I refuse to believe that, as some claim, D'Orazio wouldn't have been able to play material like this...
I was expecting something brave, a return to the glory days of the Prog rock of Parsifal, a bit of our best time, or maybe it's still poetry… Instead, they sound like the "Dream Theater" (losers) of our own... A sound that was already old when Dream Theater, Blind Guardian, Fates Warning, and others were just starting out...
A cloying Prog Metal... If I think of great things like "Il Tempo, Una Donna, la città", "Parsifal", "L'anno, il posto, l'ora", "Mediterraneo", "1966," I could cry...
Oh my God... Compared to that, "diiooooo delleee ciutttàààààà" is a masterpiece... and I never thought I would say it... At least there the lyrics had a deep meaning…

Once, Helene Grimaud's teacher told her: "You don't have to be the best pianist in the world, but you must be a unique pianist."
Helene Grimaud is not a virtuoso. She is not hyper-technical like Lisitsa or our Pollini. Grimaud is disliked because she reinterprets, in her own way, the most important pages of the greatest composers in our history. Listening to her performance of Beethoven's Fifth Concerto, for example, is disconcerting. Out of time, with "strange" passages that bear no relation to her historic recording from the 1960s with Kempff at the piano. But if you close your eyes and listen to her soar over the keys, then you take flight, alongside her... Her fingers seem to float, caressing the keys and weaving arabesques of lights and colors... Even the austere Beethoven becomes radiant, almost playful. Without taking anything away from the expressive force, when needed.
Oh no, don't expect praises for Helene Grimaud... Many judge her even unworthy of recording for DG... But they are the same ones who detest our Pollini and who have only listened to Backhaus, Kempff, and Rubinstein in their lives... Poor souls, they don’t know what they are missing. And to put it in the words of Maestro Scimone, conductor and music historian: classical music, its performance has moved on (thank God), and today, for biological reasons as well, it is unnatural and foolish to continue presenting it as it was done 50 years ago. Yes, thank goodness it is possible to think of interpreting Beethoven, Chopin, giving them "new life" and other fragments of eternity: as Helene Grimaud does.

Pollini is not cold; unlike Rubinstein and Horowitz, he is the first of the "modern pianists." His Chopin, Beethoven, and Schumann are icy—not cold, psychoanalytic, where the aforementioned artists drooled out mannerisms and romanticism... Hyper-technical, with an extremely high dynamic range that captures the timbre of the piano, which is not the most "characterizing" instrument (in Pollini's own words) that exists (the violin is much more so), but certainly the most versatile and complete.
Listening to Pollini's late piano sonatas of Beethoven, a highlight of D&G from the late '70s, is a journey into a Beethoven as I've always imagined him: a pre-eminent "Rocker"... Just listen to the Hammerklavier or no. 32 to understand what I mean. Today we have virtuosos like Valentina Lisitsa, Lang Lang, and a thousand others, but Pollini, as someone said, "is in a class of his own".... He simply refines, as an artist does with a chisel, what is unnecessary and gives back the "heart" of the music, the sonata, the étude, or the nocturne... What remains is the essence, the soul, not the "frills"... As so many others have trained us to expect....

It must be said that the polonaises don't particularly engage me, but I would like to tell VERAMAZZOCCA that he is mistaken, and quite seriously... The nocturnes of Chopin alone are worth, TO ME, the entire catalog of LISZT and SCHUMANN, the former sickly sweet, the latter irritating...
Then there are the études, the preludes, the waltzes, even the concertos... Brahms, after a while, gives me orchitis! The same goes for Mozart, except for rare exceptions.
The only composers I consider equally or more worthy than Chopin are Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Schubert.
Chopin is an icon, a legend, a myth, like Beethoven. Perhaps because, like Puccini in another field, he has touched "strings" that very few others have touched. Because any person, even the average man, even the uneducated, the barbarian, when they listen to Chopin, can be moved, can stop and think. When I listen to the third nocturne, for example, I get emotional, and I don't know why... I find myself with teary eyes of "motu proprio," beyond my will.
But Chopin must be "treated," as Pollini does; it must be stripped of all the romantic "Rubinsteinian" smudges. Only then can it be appreciated for what it is, for what it wants to convey. Because Chopin doesn't speak to the "heart," he speaks to the soul, which is something entirely different.
Best regards

I only know that since I discovered Pollini, he has become my hero... He has given new life and different meanings to pianisms that had become asphyxiated, all alike, repeating in a "loop" for decades... The various Rubinstein, Horowitz, Kempff, Brendel, and finally Ashkenazy and Schiff...
Pollini strips the "Romanticism" of those mannerist affectations that I am sure Chopin (but also Schumann, Beethoven) did not intend. His Chopin is a sideral walk through psychoanalytic mazes, which have little to do with the "cheap romanticism" invented in the twentieth century... Those nocturnes that I call "make-out sessions"... No, his are icy (but not cold), introspective, psychoanalytic... And to put it like Michelangelo Buonarroti, what remains after removing the superfluous is the WORK. That's it.
Best regards.

"suspended in the incredible" is among the 4 or 5 largest suites in the world of progressive music, not just Italian... De Rossi captivates me in that piece...

Actually, Hypno is not out of place at all... I could keep quoting you Miles Davis, Coltrane, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Bach, and Chopin (among my absolute favorites) all the way to the "cultured" electronic music of Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, and company... I also adore (these) Pooh... what do we make of that??

People do not understand why there is such overwhelming musical disinformation and ignorance in Italy. The former is the consequence of the "political processes" against singers in the '70s, where if you weren't engaged like Guccini, De André, or De Gregori, you weren't even worthy of being called a musician; the latter is endemic to our country.
If the Pooh had been English or American, they would be considered among the most important groups of all time. I have seen both YES and POOH live, and the latter, on an improvised stage in Piazza Duomo in Milan, did things that YES, in a theater with tons of equipment, did not achieve.
"Battaglia con la chitarra" is a god, Facchinetti has a falsetto that, after Barry Gibb's, is the most important in the world... The "Fusion" turning point (if I may use the term) of "Rotolando" up to "Stop" in 1980 (one of their best performances) shows a group that has never stopped researching...
And I am frankly fed up with comparisons to REM, Velvet Underground, or Frank Zappa... What the hell does that have to do with it???
No sane person would ever dream of comparing Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" to the Piano Concertos of, I don't know, a Rachmaninoff... I don’t see why comparisons should be made in pop...
There is Rock and there is Pop... The Pooh are Pop, but of the highest class...

First of all, I applaud the reviewer. Rarely have I read a "scroll" about an artist with such enjoyment.
Let’s get to the point, to the great, immense misunderstanding that has arisen around the (dreary) figure of this somewhat pretentious, somewhat boastful young man, but very, very fake.
Allevi does NOT make "Classical Music"...
It would be like saying that a bricklayer is a drummer just because he produces hits with his hammer. Allevi and Classical Music are as related as Jerry Lee Lewis.... A piano is not enough to make classical music.... I can play "Notte prima degli esami" by Venditti, "Finché la barca va" by Orietta Berti, or even a scale on the piano... I could even have my cat play it (I once had one that loved walking on the keyboard and playing).
Allevi makes that kind of music that in my day was called "NEW AGE," the main names of which (but there are many others) were mentioned by good Breus. Moreover, he does it poorly, and absolutely out of time, at least abroad... If I have to listen to that genre, I prefer Michael Nyman, Win Mertens, and many others... But even the "pseudo-romanticism from the dance floor" of a Clayderman or better yet a Schlacks is preferable... At least Clayderman, before turning to dance floor pseudo-romanticism, had worked his tail off as a classical pianist and concert artist...
Allevi is the child of that tacky minimalism (and it only takes studying harmony from some Curcio booklet to be able to do what he does after 10 comfortable lessons) that even has the flaw of wanting to be what it is not.... I prefer then the "panty-tearing and deceitful melody" slammed in your face, like the Pooh, at least it's honest and sincere....
Because this is what Allevi does: Pop music, without singing... Any of his compositions could make up 90% of Italian light music without any singing, and without other instruments.... Just a background to enhance with winds, voices, synths, drums, and percussion...
They seem like drafts of songs, much like how many singer-songwriters present them to the Ricordi manager of the moment to get him “into the melody”....
That's what they are... At least Ludovico Einaudi and Roberto Cacciapaglia learned the Anglo-Saxon lesson of the 80s better!
Best regards

"especially"... Sorry, typo