Franco Battiato
Come Un Cammello In Una Grondaia

In the pre-internet era, if you didn't read specialized magazines, news about upcoming albums arrived at the last minute; you'd find them in a family magazine or occasionally in a newspaper. It happened that in 1991 you were flipping through Sorrisi e Canzoni and discovered that among the autumn releases there was a new album by Battiato (oh well!) titled "Come un cammello in una grondaia." And just from the title, you wondered what surprise, what oddity Battiato would have in store for you this time... Good God, but it wasn't the eye of the needle, what did the gutter have to do with it?

The gutter was indeed relevant. It involved a Persian mystic, I believe from the medieval period, and it was relevant to an album that was a challenge. The second album in Franco Battiato's "mystic" trilogy (the first is "Fisiognomica," the third and final "Caffè de la paix" - to which should be added the "classical" works of the same period, "Genesi," "Gilgamesh," and "Messa Arcaica"), the "Cammello" indeed raises the bar even further. Firstly, the pop instrumentation is gone—no more bass, guitar, and drums. The arrangements are entirely entrusted to a classical orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Giusto Pio, enriched only by discreet synthesizer sounds. Secondly, four new songs are complemented by four 19th-century lieder, vocally reinterpreted by Battiato with grace and simplicity, thus entirely stripped of the formal solemnity of classical bel canto, with the result of making them both modern and human.

The more or less manifest objective of the operation was evidently to show how certain barriers, certain distinctions between musical genres, are often forced and artificial. And the result is surprisingly beautiful. The four classical lieder, by Wagner, Martin, Brahms, and Beethoven, not all equally easy to listen to, to be honest, harmonize seamlessly with the four original compositions, which in turn are equally valuable pieces. "Povera Patria" is one of the most beautiful Italian songs of all time and certainly needs no introduction, having immediately become a classic in the singer-songwriter's repertoire. One of Battiato's very few somewhat political songs, it is a poignant and heartfelt accusation, of great emotional and poetic strength. The title track is a true flight of strings (listen to it) over a meditation on the discomfort of being in a world to which the author feels he does not fully belong. "Le sacre sinfonie del tempo" is a melodious reflection on the celestial spheres and the human condition, perhaps the most textually heavy piece of the album, but it is with "L'ombra della luce" that all of Battiato's so-called mystical production reaches its peak. It is indeed a universal prayer, laid on a musical carpet of rare beauty, to which too many words cannot do justice and only listening can provide. All sung by a Battiato in great interpretative form, who manages to infuse feeling and human warmth into the lyrics in a truly convincing manner.

The album, recorded at the historic Abbey Road studios, won its challenge both artistically and commercially, selling in a way that the record label (in its stolid short-sighted major logic) would never have suspected. We, on our part, did not suspect that Franco Battiato could amaze us even more than this, and above all, this album made us think that perhaps the times of "Cuccurucucu" and "Bandiera Bianca," much to our dismay, were truly gone forever, but we were destined to be caught off guard many more times, and definitively contradicted by an ambush a few years later. To our admitted satisfaction.