“Is there a drummer in the house?” This was the question Danilo Rustici asked after Tony Esposito stormed off the stage where two former members of Osanna were trying to launch their new project, Uno. It was a life-changing moment for Vince Vallicelli, the Romagna-born drummer of Hellza Poppin, who had learned the tricks of the trade with Secondo Casadei and was now ready to join the big league of Italian progressive rock. The experience of Uno was short-lived and resulted in just one album, but generated legions of enthusiastic fans. Among them is the extraordinary composer and multi-instrumentalist Enrico Gabrielli who, with two other members of Afterhours, now enthusiastically re-proposes the music of Uno, not to “slavishly” repeat it, but rather to start anew from its creative energy and build a completely new project, in step with the times but deeply respecting the legacies of a mythical past.

The Programme

“In times of pestilence, we must talk about love.” Prophetic as usual, Vinicio Capossela interprets the era of “liquid music” in increasingly complex, ambitious and narrative works. His Bestiary of Love is a loose cannon of orchestral song-writing, both popular and philological, dedicated to all the forms love can take, and modelled on medieval bestiaries like Richard de Fournival’s XII-century Bestiaire d’amour. Capossela’s taste for the playful deconstruction of taxonomy had already showed up at the Festival in 2014, with a tribute to Saint-Saëns in his Carnival of the Animals and Other Love Beasts. The new project intends to reveal that “people in love are monsters overwhelmed by a need of showing themselves. And, since we cannot do without love, we will celebrate it in the form of a bestiary.”

The Programme