VINICIO CAPOSSELA: STORIES FROM THE SEA AND A CONCERT FOR VENICE

It was under the starry sky, the moon shyly showing itself upon the green cypresses of San Giorgio Island (Venice), that Vinicio Capossela, Italian singer and songwriter with a certain poetic vein, chose to set up his special concert for Venice, Ballate nella barena- ombre, oriente e caìgo, Friday 7^th September 2012. The theater is romantically facing on the Venetian lagoon, against which the stage was built. A dark stage actually, lightened only by few small yellow lamps, the city lights visible on the background through the trees. The concert opened with the chorus from Il Grande Leviatano (from Marinai, Profeti e Balene, La Cupa/Warner, 2011) followed by some quotations from Melville, Conrad and Ruskin, passionately read by Capossela, who revealed the concert's theme: stories from the sea, stories of sailormen. Thus, a sailor hat on top of his head, he sang his Venice (the city of Marco Polo, the Ghetto, the city that was once the bridge between the East and the West) through some of his best songs.

He also paid homage to Noodles, character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Homer’s and Dante’s Ulysses. On the stage, a special guest, Manolis Pappos (who features also in Capossela’s latest album Rebetiko Gymnastas -La Cupa/ Warner, 2012-), talented bouzouki player, Alessandro Stefana (guitar), Dimitri Sillato (violin), Glauco Zuppiroli (double-bass) along with Vincenzo Vasi (vocals, therenim, sampler). As he has done in Rebetiko Gymnastas, Capossela revisited some of his songs in a rebetiko key (a genre of Greek music, he said, that ‘does not fear the pain, so that its main instrument, bouzouki, has the shape of a tear’), playing the piano and the shofar as well as entertaining people with a whale-shaped barrel organ. He performed songs such as Polpod’Amor or Pryntyl, taking even the chance to criticize the Italian political class. Finally, when all seemed to come to an end, he decided that he wanted  to go on and die at his piano. So he gave the public some more love songs until the lights were turned off. ‘Vinicio, Che coss’è l’amor!’ (‘What’s love!’) someone shouted from his seat. “Ah, if I knew that…”, Capossela answered back.

Then it was dark again, only the moonlight showing our way home.