Franco Battiato
Fleurs 3

The second chapter of the Fleur trilogy was released in 2002 and successfully continues the skillful commercial project of Franco Battiato. It indeed strings together two platinum records and eventually surpasses the first Fleur, without being reached by the second, which will be released six years later. All good then? From an economic point of view, certainly, but musically speaking and keeping in mind that we are largely in the pop realm, the result doesn't seem very significant to me.

Battiato tackles the reissue of 10 hit covers, inserting a single new track in a duet with Alice, the penultimate track "Come un Sigillo," in addition to the proposal of a short composition by Richard Strauss. Generally, this operation is aimed at musically enhancing and updating tracks that have brought success to their authors and performers. In this case, the result is rather modest, resulting in an overall musical jam with the voice of Battiato, now monotone, as the guiding thread, far from his best times.

After the hasty conclusion (a coincidence?) of the opening track, take, for example, the reissue of "Impressioni di Settembre" a full 40 years after PFM's masterpiece was released, the comparison seems frankly ruthless: the grit and the pathos of the progressive group are completely missing, the famous growing organ solo is resolved in some manner, a very poor musical base, in short, our Franco did not want to upset the original, but in attempting to preserve its best has produced a poor copy. This is followed by a couple of tracks suitable for evening drowsiness whose authors, Chaplin and Lauzi, are probably still rolling in their graves, up to the boredom of "Col tempo sai," more a list of misfortunes than a track of popular music.

Luckily, there is the famous track by Caterina Caselli "Insieme a te non ci sto più" to slightly awaken the scene, even if it's clear that our hero is uncomfortable with so much movement... returning decidedly more understated with Gino Paoli's masterpiece "Il cielo in una stanza," perhaps the best-executed track although the contrast between the very salient drums and the string group raises some doubts. If you manage to survive the next three tracks "Le tue radici" (already lacking initially, but at least a bit more lively in this revisited version), "Se tu sapessi" (yet another endless and sickly disappointment posthumous to poor Lauzi), and "Sigillata con un Bacio" (a track from 1962 dear to the youth of the Catanese singer-songwriter and of which he manages the historical recovery), you can "enjoy" the real novelty on the cloying organ base in which it's difficult to rate the commitment of the guest well integrated into a piece that has as its sole merit its limited duration. A very demanding finale in the German language, notoriously very suitable for popular music, for the recital of a sonnet by Hermann Hesse (Nobel Prize laureate in literature and the most read German writer in the world alongside Thomas Mann), who, as a great admirer of our country, where he passed away in 1962, would surely have appreciated Battiato's gesture, but nothing more.

Opinion rounded up thanks to the beautiful cover, sonic technical quality forgettable, but suitable for homogenizing the musical jam.