Fabio Curto
L'Ultimo Esame

About two years ago, I reviewed an album that happened to come my way thanks to a radio station in Bologna. I never thought that the mainstream circuit, in this case television, would reward what seemed to me then, and still seems to me today, a small -very personal- discovery, destined for a niche of selected few listeners.
Fabio Curto is an artist who is achieving great public success, thanks to his recent participation in the talent show The Voice, where the Calabrian singer and composer immediately established himself as one of the most convincing and appreciated performers.
Fabio Curto's main skill is in providing an absolutely personal characterization to any interpretation, a way of understanding music as a generous exchange between artist and audience, in a dimension that is never intimate, but arises to reaffirm the dialectical and emotional value of music and words.
Personally, I have never liked reviewing singles, because they often end up being partial visions of a much fuller complexity, which finds consecration and sufficient space only in the format of the classic album. Fortunately, in this case, I don't feel particularly embarrassed because even listening to just one track by Fabio Curto - in this case "L'Ultimo Esame" presented as a preview during the final stages of The Voice - one perceives the great versatility of an artist who is now accomplished, ready for a final and well-deserved consecration.
The piece develops like a classic pop ballad, where the voice, a recognizable element of his singing, is effectively placed at the forefront. Curto's voice, painful and hoarse, narrates his past-present as a street artist, moments of surrender and redemption, darkness and light, always keeping alive and present the dialogue with a "her" (imagined or real, it doesn't matter), repeatedly invited to "take the darkness that is in me." A street prayer, a magnificent urban fresco, centering the artist, with his dreams and inevitable disillusions. Although in this first test as a singer-songwriter, Fabio Curto chooses to confront typical stylistic elements of Italian pop songs from recent years, with apparent musical parallels to Francesco Renga and some ballads by Ligabue, the track is convincing precisely due to the combination of pop sound structure and particularly direct and emotional lyrics. It stays catchy but with a more refined and deeper aftertaste. A beautiful phrase by Shaw comes to mind, saying "We use mirrors to look at our faces, and art to look at our souls".
This is what Fabio Curto can become in the Italian music scene, an element of linkage between the singer-songwriter tradition and light music, an extremely effective conjunction of research and pop, an absolutely emblematic combination for an artist born on the street (those from Bologna have certainly seen him perform in the narrow streets of the Quadrilatero) and established through a television program. We wish him to create a sweet commotion in the Italian pop scene, and to taint with a bit of real and lived reality a world populated by many notes, but increasingly rare emotions. "L'Ultimo Esame" is a great promise. We hope this young artist, with Calabrian blood and a Bolognese life, knows how to keep it for a long time. As always in music, those who live, will see.