WWhen he plays the clarinet, it doesn't initially sound like blues, jazz or swing. What you hear from Gianluigi Trovesi is Italianità pura. So a trinity of operatic melos, instrumental bel canto and folk music. There is a lot of feeling without sentimentality, charm without superficiality, wit without triviality, spirit without academicism, a sense of history without dust from the archives in everything that the woodwind musician, composer and arranger from Bergamo tackles musically. Every motif, every sound begins to come to life, sparkling with the present, even if it is brought out of the renaissance fundament and given a historical coating like a character from the Commedia dell'Arte.
Gianluigi Trovesi, whose name alone may sound like music to German ears, is aesthetically fearless, anachronistic. The fact that he has dealt with music history, that he has studied composition and counterpoint correctly in terms of conservation, that he knows how to interpret the scores of Luciano Berio, how to improvise on El Choclo and how Cavalleria rusticana can be taken amiably seriously without exposing it in an ironic way – all of that is noticeable in his music and yet hardly overloads it. Nothing comes across as a know-it-all, everything is seductive, sensual, erotic. Losing yourself in Trovesi's sound world, even falling in love with it, is an appropriate reception.
He doesn't differentiate between popular and serious music
When he plays the alto saxophone and crosses blades with Markus Stockhausen's trumpet or performs in the clarinet summit with John Carter, Perry Robinson and Theo Jörgensmann, even the most scratchy sounds from the arsenal of free jazz do not sound like denatured instrumental sounds. There is also no distinction between popular and serious music at Trovesi.
Everything is professionally transformed into a pleasurable sound with a light hand. It is no coincidence that one of his recordings with opera snippets from Monteverdi to Pergolesi, Mascagni and Rossini to Verdi is called “Profumo di Violetta”. What he recorded with the Filarmonica Mousiké orchestra at the Teatro Serassi in Bergamo in 2008 smells as beguiling as the Riviera dei Fiori in spring. Who would be in a position to say another malicious word about operatic sentimentality?
Trovesi has appeared on stage and in the studio with many musicians of a wide variety of styles, most preferably with his friend, the accordion player Gianni Coscia, with whom he has released magnificent recordings between jazz phrasing and Italian folk music, the most beautiful perhaps being that of Umberto Eco, his lifelong friend, inspired 2019 album “La misteriosa musica della Regina Loana” with a magnificent improvisation on Basin Street Blues. Trovesi himself described how one should approach this music: “If you want to achieve immortality, you have to let yourself be touched by the mysterious Queen Loana.” Eco also claimed this in his novella. Today Gianluigi Trovesi turns eighty, already on the path to immortality.
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