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Rating: Sad fate for prog, a splendid genre, but destined to be niche.
This sad fate is confirmed once again by the Tiana Festival, the main Spanish event for enthusiasts of what is called "symphonic rock" around here.
The Tiana Festival was born ten years ago and has brought to the theater of this small locality about twenty km from Barcelona some of the great names of prog (and especially neo-prog...) such as Phish, IQ, as well as the legendary Italian prog groups PFM and Le Orme.
Unfortunately, however, despite the objective value of the musicians who performed at Tiana over the years, the small theater (which holds at most 300 people) almost never sold out, leading even the most dedicated organizers to throw in the towel and declare this X edition as the last one.
And even in this last edition, audience turnout was very low, partly due to a not particularly high-profile lineup, at least in terms of names.
It begins at 14:30 with a local group, The Knife, who play a strange raw prog, with very new wave highlights. The Catalan sextet does fairly well despite a terrible sound (which gradually improves as often happens in festivals) that penalizes them excessively. Either way, better attitude than technique.
The second to "take the field" are the French Silver Lining. The level is definitely higher than that of The Knife, hard sound, a superb Annie Morel on violin, but with a neo-prog keyboard that cries out for revenge (in my opinion the biggest limitation of the genre is precisely the horrible sound of '80s keyboards that kill the magic of progressive... but that's just my opinion). However, what makes Silver Lining "unique" is the "singer/narrator" Frodo… a friendly gentleman of 50/60 years dressed in a robe (yes, the kind you wear over pajamas!) who recites unlikely poems about the adventures of Tolkien characters and who is truly unsatisfactory at singing... I'm sorry, but with these premises, it's hard to be taken seriously even by the freakiest fans.
After the adventures of the elderly French Frodo, it's time for another Spanish group, Dificil Equilibrio, who perform in a very tight hour-long suite (!) of a late-Krimson style. Great technique, especially from the bass-drum duo (Enric Gisbert and Lluis Rodrigues) supporting guitarist-leader Alberto Díaz, but the music is a bit cold and generally hard to digest.
Around 19:00 comes what, in my modest opinion, was the festival's high point, namely the performance of the Italians Consorzio Acqua Potabile.
A truly great group, the Piedmont ensemble led by Maurizio Venegoni (along with guitarist Massimo Gorlezza the only survivor of the '70s lineup) with cousins Maurizio and Chicco Mercandino (respectively lead vocals and lead guitar) as the main strengths.
In the '70s, CAP did not have the same luck as their colleagues Banco and PFM, whom they were inspired by, and began their recording career only in the second phase of their history starting in the '90s. And it is mostly from the albums Robin delle Stelle (1998) and Il Bianco Regno di Dooah (2003), as well as from the '70s rock opera Gerbrand, that the intense tracks of their set are drawn. Great emotion among the audience when Venegoni read a greeting from Francesco Di Giacomo to the Spanish fans with which he introduced the performance of Traccia and Traccia II by Banco.
The penultimate chapter of the festival was the performance of the rather unconvincing English Galahad, balancing between simplistic prog, pop, and new wave... their performance was quite forgettable.
The most awaited group of the evening, Twelfth Night, with their '80s-made neo-prog, concluded, thrilling their fans.
The singer Andy Sears (replacement for the late Geoff Mann) is a stage animal, the group plays excellently, but, as they would say, being English, "it's not my cup of tea," perhaps also because after about 11 hours of concert, I was exhausted.
At 2:30 in the morning, the musical marathon of Tiana closes, leaving me with a bittersweet taste: prog is great music, especially when played by great artists like CAP tonight... however, if the largest Spanish prog festival has less than 100 paying spectators, it means the genre is not just niche but can be considered quietly and sadly dying...
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