Giovanni Allevi
Sunrise

Has a ranking of the worst records ever made in Italy ever been compiled? I think of Pippo Franco with his "Mi scappa la pipì papà," Heather Parisi's "Cicale," the worst Albano & Romina, Toto Cutugno, "Italia" by Mino Reitano (though the song is by Umberto Balsamo), Gli alunni del Sole, the Santo California, the worst Italian singer of all time: Caterina Caselli, the little chick Pio, certain Fininvest cartoon themes, Mal and his "Furia cavallo del west...". That's enough, I'm not feeling well...

Yet our Wolfgang Amadeus from Ascoli Piceno (aka Giovanni Allevi), with his latest (cesarean) effort, would deserve to enter the top spots of this unfortunate hit parade. Rarely has something more vile, patched-up, rhetorical, superficial, provincial, pleonastic, and other terms that don't come to mind right now (but someone should invent them quickly just for Allevi), been heard than this CD, which manages to be the quintessence of total nothingness. It is not classical music or contemporary music, nor is it light music. So is it New Age? No. Is it something else? No. It is simply nothing. Classical-like modules that wouldn't even move my uncle are clumsily joined to pseudo-modern structures or rather (forgive me this horrible adjective which perhaps manages to convey the idea) "modernistic" ones, that have nothing allegedly modern about them, being nothing but musical modules so elementary they make a duck's skin crawl... Even the vile Richard Clayderman or the abominable Steven Schlaks managed to be more sincere than Allevi: their proposal was clear from the start: little songs for women past their forties looking for a scrap of past thrills for an evening with their boss, or background music for car sexual encounters, with newspapers taped to the windows against voyeurs...

Allevi has gone beyond: with cheekiness between Napoleon Bonaparte and Genghis Khan, the bespectacled philosopher from Ascoli Piceno declared he wanted to redesign the features of modern music and the piano (in fact, we were waiting for him...), as if composers and pianists of the caliber of Ligeti, Reich, Cage (in contemporary), or Bill Evans, Lyle Mays, Ahmad Jamal, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea (in jazz), never existed. This is intolerable. Such arrogance was upheld and imposed on the poor public opinion through massive advertising campaigns costing loads of money (whose? His family's?...), managing to impose, like a new soap bar, a character who could at most entertain (and not much), a few dozen people at a summer festivity or a wedding...

The deception nears its end, the balloon is deflating. In the age of the Internet, even the most clueless individual has understood who we are talking about. Soon Giovanni Allevi's records will find their rightful place on the shelves of some local flea market, along the lines: "Oh, do you remember this guy, he was always in the newspapers. But what happened to him?" The end he deserved, I add...