RICHARD GALLIANO | LA STRADA QUINTET

6 november
Auditorium Parco della Musica

Gelsomina, Zampanò, Cabiria, Alberto, Giulietta, Marcello take the stage again and even la Gradisca, but arm in arm with Don Vito Corleone: the fascinating accordion music of Richard Galliano meets in the musical soundtracks of Nino Rota in the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the Italian composer and creator of immortal themes which have passed from Italian cinema to the rest of the world. Galliano, born near Cannes into a family of immigrant Italian musicians, was one of the protagonists or perhaps the protagonist of the resurrection of French accordion or musette, taking its music to an international level. The sound of his accordion is unforgettable; his touch comparable to that of Astor Piazzolla ―not by chance one of his musical masters ―with Piazzola's love of the Argentine bandoneon or concertina. Galliano's musical universe is highly varied and polychromatic in its musical tones: his style ranges from the classical musette to the tango, from jazz to Latin American music, from the chanson d'autore to classical music. His distinguishing characteristic is his unique musical synthesis which he masterly applies in implementing his musical projects. He found fertile terrain for his talent in Rota's musical scores for the cinema: in particular, the soundtracks for Fellini's films and in particular, in Amarcord in which we have a ready-made theme for the accordion. But this same accordion touch is heard in many other compositions of the Milanese composer who craftily doses his classical musical themes with more popular inflections as in the soundtrack of Coppola's The Godfather. Then we have the well-known songs of a seemingly circensian or Brechtian inspiration featured in films like 8 ½, La Dolce Vita and I Vitelloni or another truly wonderful themes created for the cinema; the sound of the trumpet in La Strada (The Road) is cloaked with a bitter and profound sense of destiny. We could define Rota's style as somewhere between Gershwin and jazz to which he attributed his fluid melodic touch, rendering the music popular and familiar to Italian ears. Galliano was fascinated when he stepped into this music universe. Created in the intimacy of his ensemble, Galliano's music is imbibed with the softness of jazz, the languid melancholy of the tango, the playful rhythm of circensian themes and the brio of swing, all brought together in the soft, unmistakable French sound of his musette.