When Roby Facchinetti rereads his music with the orchestra
November 26, 2021 Roby Facchinetti released the double album “Symphony”. At that time we asked the colleague Andrew Pedrinelliwhat gods Pooh he is a great expert, to interview for us Roby Facchinetti. We report it and propose it again below.
“I came home.”
Roby Facchinetti laughs when asked if the new album “Symphony”, two CDs (in January also three LPs) of his classics and unreleased songs re-read with orchestra, is not by chance a way of giving real life back to his music, rather than “new life” as stated in the press release. “Ah, maybe I shouldn’t say it – declares Roby – but in fact it is like this. Because even the lighter songs find their soul more correct with the orchestra, and because my feeling is that these pieces of mine are more authentic with a large classical ensemble around them, than in other sound contexts”.
After all, Facchinetti is a gentleman who will go down in history for the cultured originality of his suites, for some of his unparalleled melodic developments with a lyrical flavour, for his remarkable ability to combine singing refrains with refined harmonies and jagged rhythmic movements.
And in fact, in “Symphony” some of the Bergamo artist’s masterpieces of this genre are very well represented, sometimes with touches of arrangement that make it clear how fundamentally he is not too distant from a Morricone, in terms of pure composition. : the cornerstone “Parsifal”, the recent “I will be reborn, you will be reborn”, the historic “Pierre”, but also “A world that does not exist” or “In silence” are enough in this regard. Facchinetti grew up with classical-lyrical music, this is: and it is this training that gave him and consequently Pooh an edge. Roby remembers: “I listened to music with my mother and in my imagination the orchestra was already a beautiful thing at the age of five, which made me feel good. I would have liked to conduct it, an orchestra, which is why I feel at home in today’s project.”
In “Symphony” Roby Facchinetti is joined by the Italian Symphonic Rhythm Orchestra and the Budapest Art Orchestra, orchestrated and directed by Maestro Diego Basso: and in the setlist, after an “Ouverture” anticipating the most interesting themes (and challenges) of the ensemble , nine Pooh songs are on display (one, it must be said, by Dodi Battaglia: the beautiful “Ci penserò Tomorrow”) and five from Facchinetti’s recent solo repertoire. However, there aren’t the pop-rock-symphonic gems of Pooh’s Lucarellian period, things like “For you something again” or “Oceano”: but because Roby is allocating them not so much to the album’s next live shows (from March 2022, for now set Bergamo, Milan, Florence, Mantua, Rome and Turin) but rather to a “Symphony 2” he hoped for.
On the other hand, almost rock hits such as “Chi fermerà la musica” are symphonically reinterpreted, about which Facchinetti reveals: “I had a thousand doubts. In a project like this “Pierre” or “Uomini soli”, which I now interpret alone as it was born before the Sanremo idea, they chose themselves. While rereading “My Friend’s Woman” already left me perplexed, I thought about “Who Will Stop the Music” a lot. I wanted to be reassured. Maestro Basso succeeded in the undertaking, with a very complicated arrangement for violins which respected it and made it beautiful”.
As always, however, Facchinetti wasn’t satisfied with about fifteen songs to reread almost entirely: while he was at it he composed four new ones, then also giving fans a piece, “Grande madre”, written years ago and never published until now. “’Grande Madre’ is a score that evoked spirituality in me from birth, and in fact I had passed it to Stefano D’Orazio telling him that for me it was a prayer. Stephen with his text made it an invocation to Mary, imbued with true faith. But when she was born it didn’t make sense to include her in what we were doing; last year I promised Stefano that I would record it as soon as possible, finally, and now I have done it: and perhaps it is the right time, because things never happen by chance and now we need to pray to humanity of Mary. If we had recorded it years ago it would perhaps have seemed rhetorical.”
Three of the other unreleased songs (all written recently, “I think the period we are living in has unleashed my creativity”) are instead songs with lyrics by Maria Francesca Polli, two also with the rhythm of pop-rock which does not appear elsewhere, and for Roby they represent different souls of the author: the almost prog rock writing (“Music is life”), the wide-ranging sentimental ballad (“Se perdo te”), the dream-music or poetry (the very refined, splendid “How wonderful”). “Respiri” on the other hand is an unreleased instrumental, the last song of the setlist, a splendid snapshot of the entire project. “Because the instrumental is the type of song that best represents me” underlines Roby. “’Respiri’ is a two-headed piece, first in minor and then in major, with the soprano Claudia Sasso embellishing it; and aims at the highest, purest essence of making music. Because as an author, I find completeness, or rather I have always found it, in naked music”.
