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Rating: Two and a half hours of concert, the crowd going wild, not accepting the end, demanding encore after encore that Vinicio Capossela generously granted. A spectacle for the eyes to compensate for the constraint of the theater seats; one cannot dance, and so here are visions galore, by the pound, by the kilo. An enveloping and imaginative shadow theater, scenographic touches selected song by song. And the two emotional peaks: the call to Nutless and a mournful and moving "Ss. dei naufragati".
Capossela changes hats and clothes almost for every song, an amused shapeshifter. He made a strength of the heterogeneity of the tracks from the latest CD, which he performed in its entirety, in an hour and a half's apnea. Among the encores, he ventured into the unprecedented setting to music of two beautiful sonnets by Michelangelo, backed by the chiaroscuro cello of Mario Brunello. Very few revisits from old albums, a masked "Marajà", a "Modì" dedicated to Ciampi, Al veglione in a carnivalesque key, "Con una rosa", "Che coss'è l'amor" transformed into "Besame mucho". Almost three hours of earthy, blood-soaked, sensual music, and that subtext of ancestral violence, hidden and almost subliminal; a masked and dancing mammutones violated by the red light of a spotlight grunts psalmically his jihad verses: "Do not negotiate, do not negotiate, do not negotiate your faith. . . look, Lord, they bark like dogs they come out at night they are all around my house. . . destroy them Lord, Lord of the hosts. . . hit them, scatter them till in the blood of the wicked I will wash my feet". Passages from the Quran? No, not only. Much is taken from our Old Testament. . .
Blood, flesh, domination. Violence. Vinicio Capossela today, almost nonchalantly, talks to us about this. In a neo-barbaric era, he decides to look back and take a glance at history, a river in flood with corpses, a road paved with bones and good intentions. Religious wars, economic wars, ethnic wars. There is very little to laugh about, it would seem. But last night, at Teatro Verdi in Florence, we laughed. Because Capossela has that air about him, of the jester who between one jest and another, with the worst possible poker face, points out that the Emperor has no clothes, that we have little to boast about our alleged Enlightenment superiority. In our DNA are the gruesome circus games of the Colosseum (curiously interrupted by the arrival of the barbarous barbarians), there is the totemic and popular religiosity of the Risen Christ of Scicli, there is the thirst for blood of the Bible, the martyrdom of the Christian body. A hidden barbarity, which in periods of whole-hearted fundamentalism is resurfacing in the form of T-shirts, tight-lipped thoughts, talk-shows, talk-shows, talk-shows, Marcello Pera & Joseph Ratzinger. We are plunging back into those times, that distant past, Capossela suggests smiling. And his good-natured smile has never seemed so unsettling.
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