Le Orme
In concerto

A strange story precedes the record release of this live album, the first complete concert document published in Italy by a rock band, still one of the most famous albums of Italian progressive rock today. If it were up to Le Orme, the album wouldn't have been released, but it must be said that there’s something unclear in the whole matter. Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

We all know who Le Orme were in January 1974: a progressive trio clearly inspired by the ELP formula, with the notable difference of wanting to apply the prog treatment to Italian singer-songwriter music (traditionally melodic in style) and thus being mainly dedicated, not so much to the lengthy keyboard improvisations that had become proverbial for a group of this genre from Tarkus onwards, but to the arrangement of beautiful, delicate, and dreamy songs, entrusted to the excellent voice of Aldo Tagliapietra (the Italian Jon Anderson) and often accompanied by a beautiful acoustic guitar. Emerson Lake & Palmer, anyway.

Toni Pagliuca's keyboards have always been deliberately essential, organ, synth, and piano without any sequencer (in 1974 they could have had one, budget aside) precisely because Le Orme never wanted to be over-arranged, at least in those years: few overdubs and the focus was mainly on the notable expressive skills of the three instrumentalists. These keyboards were spirited, not unlike those in ‘Pictures At An Exhibition’ but decidedly less advanced in technology and effects (there was barely a frequency generator), yet always remarkably evocative and descriptive. Even Le Orme (like Cream, Hendrix, and Kraftwerk) often played by ‘subtracting’ rather than ‘adding’, basing their music also on empty spaces, on the solitude of bass lines (only Emerson always doubled them all), and on the crystalline strings of Aldo's acoustic guitar. Michi Dei Rossi, for his part, secures a place of honor among the drummers of the prog era: less showy than Franz Di Cioccio, less experimental than Capiozzo, and less jazzy than Furio Chirico, yet he is an excellent drummer; with a rather noisy style that would like to look to Palmer but can't use Palmer's monstrous equipment, so he adopts the characteristics of hard drummers, looking to John Bonham and Ian Paice more than Phil Collins or Bill Bruford. Emerson Lake & Palmer all'amatriciana, indeed.

The fact is that the three from Veneto are really very good, ostrega, and compose very beautiful things, whether they are fantasy fairy tales or very structured mini-suites and always very rock (‘La Porta Chiusa’, ‘Cemento Armato’). The beat beginnings are quickly set aside and Le Orme find their way to Mediterranean prog, winning over a fierce following of loyal fans who follow them on Italian and European tours (myself included) and starting to sell pretty well for a group with such imaginative music. The success of ‘Gioco Di Bimba’, an intelligent and refined evergreen (both stylistically and lyrically), does the rest and Le Orme record their masterpiece with means available to them until that point unknown.

‘Felona e Sorona’ immediately enters the history of Italian music, like and more than the previous ‘Uomo Di Pezza’, also due to the interest and friendship of Peter Hammill who becomes passionate about their music and produces and translates the English version of the album. The concept album allows for a great stage performance, including a drum solo, and the band embarks on a tour full of growing satisfactions (and the audience continually shouts ‘Emerson, Emerson’ when Toni performs his evolutions).

Precisely for this reason, it’s unclear why Philips, very willing to invest in the making of a live album, doesn’t ensure that the most representative concerts are professionally recorded for subsequent mixing. Yes, because it’s the record label insisting on making a live album, but the only tapes available are those provided by amateurs who captured the two concerts at Teatro Brancaccio, January 16 and 17, 1974, whose sound quality is questionable at best. Amateur, indeed. Strange, these amateurs plugged into the mixer (the audience can barely be heard) for two consecutive evenings, it’s possible but the sound would still be better, I’ve plugged into the mixer once myself. Were they among the crowd with a tape recorder, as big as a briefcase, and well-aimed directional microphones, then? It doesn't seem like it, the sound is too stable, they wouldn't have giraffes. I don’t know. Simply put, it seems suspicious to me that a ‘makeshift’ recording emerges precisely when Le Orme resist and argue that if they wanted to make a live, it would have been better to organize beforehand. It’s also possible that Philips arranged an audio capture without their knowledge, which due to the technicians' inexperience was not much different from a bootleg (in Italy, there was no experience in ambient recording of rock music).

Whatever the case, the three reflect on the fact that a beautiful version of a long and unreleased suite (‘Truck Of Fire, Parts I-II’) can occupy a full twenty-two minutes on the proposed album’s first side, complete with a drum solo, while a selection of chosen tracks on side B could feature an extended version of ‘Era Inverno’ (a sad reflection on prostitution), the hits ‘Sguardo Verso il Cielo’ and ‘Collage’, and a very impactful excerpt from the concept of the two planets. The musicians at least ask to keep the price of the album low – after all, it’s an experiment, not too well executed – but in the end, their request is not heeded, and the album is released regularly and sells well, and continues to sell despite the rough sound quality (all in all fascinating, it manages to simulate the depth and especially the confusion of a concert hall).

It’s the first complete live of Italian rock, preceded only by the snippets of concerts contained in New Trolls' ‘Searching For A Land’ (and those also weren't that clearly heard). Legend has it that the unfortunate mixing of ‘Cook / PFM Live In USA’, which will be released a few months later, was inspired by this ‘concert effect’ (better call it ‘distance effect’) of this ‘Le Orme In Concerto’, which in the end is not so bad: with frequency compression it's mostly the piano that sounds awful, but it's not much used, even though the beautiful opening of Truck Of Fire is more to guess than savor. The repertoire is excellent and thrilling, and the performance inspired and spontaneous, with all the sonic penalization, and in summary, long live the album, and everyone taking notes. The following year ‘Are(A)zione’ is released and it’s a whole different experience, and from there on live albums become customary and a source of pride even in Italy, up to the monumental ‘Concerto’ by Branduardi and then to ‘Icaro’ by Zero, which popularizes everything (even ‘Me, Live’ by Adriano Celentano and ‘Canada Wonderland – Pupo Live In Canada’, no less, will arrive). I have followed Le Orme across half of Italy for many years and recall beautiful concerts and many ‘good vibrations’, and some can be perceived even in this fortunate album, so famous and so strangely achieved.