Canzoni a Manovella, the epic of a century.

Onomatopoeia is a rhetorical escamotage that reproduces through linguistic sounds, or the noise  associated with something to which one wants to refer.

The ticking of the clocks marks time, the newborn baby emits wails like baby animals, sadness forces us to weep and despair to sob. Grief makes us emit moaning noises. Then good things are said to make a bang, joy vents in laughter, which is often boisterous. Everything, even before words, can be identified by a noise, by a sound… onomatopoeic.

In this year, the Barezzi Festival comes across into linguistics and phonetics – why not? -, after all a noise is still a sound, and sounds evolve into music.

We start from a noise: BRZZ!

Pronounce it as you like and sound it as you like.

BRZZ does not derive from the ancient Semitic languages that do not have vowels, it is a sound suggestion, a breath or a hiss, the crackling of a fuse that triggers an explosion.

But again, it can be the crackle of an old Lambretta engine or the ignition of a “rotopiano”.

Noises that smell of poetry and centuries past, of revolution, of innovation.

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper” said one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Thomas Eliot.

The Barezzi Festival neither begins nor ends this year, and avoiding bangs and groans we chose BRZZ.

In a preview of this edition, the protagonist will be a sound enchanter: Vinicio Capossela who, in view of the 25-year anniversary of Canzoni a manovella, will hold a concert on 19 October in which he will perform the entire album.

In a preview of this edition, the protagonist will be a sound enchanter: Vinicio Capossela who, in the 25-year anniversary of Canzoni a manovella, will hold a concert on 19 October in which he will perform the entire album.

The venue will be the Milan Conservatory where Giuseppe Verdi was rejected because he was deemed “unfit at music”.

A tribute to Verdi and a gift to the public with an artist who will perform an absolutely extraordinary and unique gig.

Canzoni a manovella is a record dedicated to daredevils, to adventurers, to those who had the courage to jump and who, as in a futurist boutade, perhaps crashed.

Conceived at the end of the last century, it was released in 2000 just as the Internet was coming forcefully into our lives.

The fuse is triggered by reading Celine, Vinicio is fascinated by it and immerses himself completely in the previous century by retracing the fundamental steps of 20th century technique.

During this period Capossela in Ravenna comes across the Marini Museum which collects over 400 mechanical instruments from the beginning of the century, many of which are phantasmagorical contraptions.

He is fascinated by them and decides that they are perfect for the texts he is writing.

The redemption of mechanics on digitalization.

Numerous literary references and ideas are present in the album.

Celine and the doctor Bardamù, protagonist of Journey to the End of the Night, give the title and inspiration to the first song. A ballad that ends futuristically with a cannon shot.

Suona Rosamunda takes its cue from Primo Levi and the story of the SS fanfare that inside the Auschwitz camp sings the song Rosamunda. The joy that becomes grotesque, testifying that the twentieth century was also a century of great tragedy.

To Alfred Jarry and his pataphysics, which is the art of imaginary solutions, is dedicated Decervellamento, a crazy march inspired by the Ubu cycle.

The title track is a nursery rhyme with marinated rhymes and bizarre instruments that intertwine in the epic of a crew in a bottle on the seabed. The alienating sounds are the result of brass instruments filtered in a tube to give an underwater effect, sonar and percussion instruments made from bottles. On guitar is Marc Ribot, Tom Waits’ long-time partner.

There is also the circus and in I Pagliacci we can find the age-old drama of clowns and their painted smiles that hides sadness.

There are also numerous imaginary and imagined characters that alternate in the remaining songs. A court of miracles of blade war marshals, mother-grandmothers and mother-dominas.

Even objects come to life in I Pianoforti di Lubecca, a poetic peak that tells of a love that blossoms between two disused pianos in a German warehouse. Mr. Bluthner courts Mrs. Duysen in a fairy-tale waltz orchestrated by Pascal Comelade on the toy piano.

The atmospheres of the album crystallize time.

Tzigan mariachis, waltzes of times gone by and romantic ballads mixed together in a monumental album overflowing with creativity.

Canzoni a manovella represents the zeitgeist of a century spied through the porthole of a diving suit that rises from the bottom of the sea towards the sky crossed by airship in which Capossela goes from diver to pioneer of the skies.

An ambitious and perfectly successful work that is unanimously considered a milestone of Italian songwriting.

The Barezzi Festival crew is taking flight lessons, this is the last crossing of the seas before our flagship becomes a hot air balloon launched towards the twentieth anniversary in 2026.

The nineteenth edition can begin.