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Rating: The evening is quite atypical for a concert, at least for me. But the concert itself is atypical, so it all makes sense. There are five of us in the car as we head to Marostica: me, my father, and three of his friends. Given the company I had, I’ll limit myself to talking about the concert rather than the evening as a whole.
We arrive at Panic around nine, and immediately it’s clear it will be a total success. A lot of people are asking to get in, but the ticket costs 18 euros, and since entry is usually free, many are already discouraged.
After a sumptuous Mexican meal in the venue, we turn our chairs while we hear "It is with great honor that I present to you Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani!! Have a great evening everyone!!
The two jazz musicians calmly arrive on stage, amidst a cascade of applause and cheers, greet the audience, and begin.
Rava excels, moves, amazes with the passion he conveys through that yellow brass tube. He pauses, closes his eyes, leans on the stool behind him, rubs his chin, attempts to keep the rhythm with his head (but with Bollani on the piano, that’s impossible), resumes, plays away from the microphone, approves his colleague’s choices, and thanks after each song.
The surprise (if it can indeed be called that) is Stefano Bollani. That man is not a man. Let me explain, he’s an alien. Rava gives him plenty of space, and he surely takes it... Virtuosity, syncopation, offbeat rhythms, frenzies, elbowing the piano, banging on the keys, stomps his foot so everyone can hear, keeps the time by tapping his hand on the piano, and writhes on the stool. Stefano dances with the piano, converses with it, engulfs it in sounds, bends it to his will, because for him the piano holds no secrets. Listening to him, I realized he wasn't actually playing: he was making love to the piano, and I think the instrument liked it a lot...
Throughout the show, Enrico and Stefano converse, joke, laugh, play, and have fun like crazy. Rava asks for "Peter and the Wolf" while Stefano is playing and he obliges, but in his own way, divinely twisting the song and the melody. Rava bursts into laughter when Stefano, three times in a row, tricks him into thinking he's restarting the main theme, only to spiral into a virtuoso passage. Rava even has him stand up during a song and says, "Do this," sits at the piano, and starts playing, "the right hand goes right and the left one goes left. On the piano, it plays well." Stefano sits and impresses him. "We were playing my piece though," the trumpeter says, and he replies, "Yes, but you started telling me what to do." General laughter. In short, more than a concert, it was a show, more than a show, an event, more than an event, a continuous emotion for more than two hours given by two artists who, when they play, become the very music they shape. Simply magnificent.
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