Gianluigi Trovesi
Profumo Di Violetta

In the place where I live, the Val Seriana in the province of Bergamo, a great jazz musician of our times was also born: Gianluigi Trovesi. But not only that. The valley is full of musical bands that include young musicians, even professionals. The band in our towns is a place where even the very young love to meet with friends and play together to enliven and enrich festivals, celebrations, and processions. Almost every town has one, and it was in one of these bands that Trovesi took his first musical steps as a youth. It is for this reason that, decades later, the musician decided to pay homage to our band tradition by performing a series of concerts and subsequently recording an album with the Filarmonica Mousiké, a wind orchestra composed of the best musicians from many of our bands.

The idea behind the project was to retrace the history of Italian opera from its origins to the 1900s in a series of panels that blend classical music with jazz arrangements. It starts with Monteverdi's "Orfeo," whose famous toccata is first presented and then freely reinterpreted. It continues chronologically with other pieces by Monteverdi and Pergolesi, with Verdi's "La Traviata," from which comes the reference to Violetta in the title, and then with "Cavalleria Rusticana" leading up to a final homage to Puccini. Everything is always transformed, revisited, deconstructed, reconstructed and interspersed with original compositions inspired by the opera and composed by Trovesi himself and some other jazz musicians. The journey is divided into six panels enclosed between a prologue and an epilogue, and within each panel, the pieces flow into one another without pauses.

In addition to the Filarmonica Mousiké, the drummer Stefano Bertoli and the cellist Marco Remondini played on the record, with Remondini "dirtying" the note "Largo al factotum" by electronically distorting the sound of the cello as if it were an electric guitar (here, purists might slightly turn up their noses).

The album, published by ECM, is one of those precious works born from the collaboration of multiple minds and musicians, a feat almost exclusive to jazz, and it constitutes a synthesis of those concerts called "Trovesi at the Opera," which you can still find around if you are lucky. The entire world critique has received it very positively.