•
Rating:
Meeting him backstage is like meeting a dear old friend: the same unadorned warmth, the same hugs that don't lie. He thanks me, blushing, and asks me to assume a "19th-century gentleman pose" for a second photo, and for a moment, I wonder who among us is a fan of the other; but it's nice to watch him while he demolishes pedestals with axe blows. "Ok, Paolo, but remember that you are already a wonderful woman in a 19th-century man's body", I reply to him, echoing one of his ancient, self-ironic statements. He laughs. We laugh.
Shortly before, in the narrow and warm belly of the Zo's concert hall in Catania, I had watched him sing, play, shout, sweat, and joke. Exactly: joke. Anyone who has ever attended a Paolo Benvegnù concert knows how inclined he is to dedicate the second part of his concerts to excellent cabaret, improvised on-site with the help of his band (namely: Andrea Franchi, Guglielmo Ridolfo Gagliano, Igor Cardeti, and Luca Baldini). "Being comical and becoming primitive again," he sang in the song "Il mare verticale", which opened the debut album "Piccoli fragilissimi film". So off we go! to delirious imitations of famous singers and hilarious student songs in thick Tuscan dialect. The laughter he draws out of us is of the same nature as the gentle emotions that, before and after, he instills with his songs: the other side of the coin.
It's all emotion, pathos and heart, when it comes to Benvegnù. The audience screams, sings, gets excited following the movements of the five spirited figures who writhe on stage; the audience is moved and applauds vigorously: a welcome, they tell me backstage, that Paolo and his band did not expect. He intones the Modugno-like "Cosa sono le nuvole", between a piece from the debut "Piccoli fragilissimi film" and one from the recent "Le labbra", and I pale at hearing the same dramatic force as the original, preserved intact in its every crumb. He revives the glories of Scisma, the group he led until 2003, gifting us hyper-protein versions of "Troppo poco intelligente" and "In dissolvenza", alongside the sweet "L'universo" and "Rosemary Plexiglass". He plays, writhing with noble fury, rousing and being roused by his stage companions. He dialogues with the audience, responds moved to the loud applause. He moves emotions en masse like a decadent Deus ex-machina. He creates, mixes, animates.
The best performance? Without a doubt, for the writer, it was that of the aforementioned "Il mare verticale", with its oblique piano chords that seem to rise from the ocean's depths, slow, cradled by the current; with Benvegnù's voice seeming to stretch towards a strange point of desperate inspiration, as if a load of joyful melancholy pervaded his vocal cords, making him sound like a new Luigi Tenco at the peak of his feeling. "I let things pass and brush against me because I am not yet able to understand them." The notes pass and brush against us, and we don't understand them, but we let them radiate our temples like a glass of excellent whisky.
"Thank you", he tells me at the end, "because the concert wasn't just done by us, on stage".
Loading comments slowly
