Lisa Germano
Live @ Sintetika - Firenze 06.05.07

LA RECENSIONE

There are concerts where you enter a world. It’s not a matter of applauding the musician's skill, so it's not a question of form. And it's not even a matter of content, communication as such of a message or feeling.

It's the empathy that matters: the very relationship that establishes between music and listener goes beyond music as such; you lose yourself precisely in a world, it’s not just watching a concert. When the reverberant notes of the beautiful grand piano and Lisa Germano's incredible and unique voice start bouncing off the walls and bodies in the ex-canteen of DLF in Via Alamanni, this is the effect. Empathy. Almost magic. A rare sensation today, in a time when rock may have definitively lost its ancestral sanctity of collective mass, its being a universal expression but also culture, youthful yes, yet motivated by demands that know how to lose themselves in the phylogeny. Instead, Germano knows how to bring out that ancient magic. She does it because she is fundamentally a "classic" artist, and for this reason, never so much needed as now, she reaffirms with her classicism not a form, but the simple yet essential fact of being unique; of having a personality, moreover enormous, of shaping every note and every syntactic form of her language, her demands, her self. This creates magic because it is through this that she builds a world and expresses it, ultimately involving those who stand in front of her.

The spell breaks only once: Lisa switches to guitar, the nasal quality of the typical rock instrument almost cloys, the suddenly higher tones break the hypnosis. She seems to notice, interrupts a song halfway: "oh fuck! I don’t want to do this song!", and then returns to the piano and her more natural world. She knows well that intensity never lasts too long, so she paces her performance to just over an hour. Some are a bit disappointed, but for me, it's better this way.

Then afterward, she makes herself available to the audience. Photos and autographs. She is small and strange, seems like a hippie with a slightly paranoid aura, not entirely at peace with herself. In her own way, however, she is beautiful. And necessary.