A great fiddler, Martin Hayes has also been the critical conscience of Irish-folk revival for the last forty years. A quiet man born into a musical family, Hayes has managed to infuse his irreversibly urbanised America with the musical tradition of County Clare, Ireland. Well aware of what it meant to handle music that had sprung from the popular womb of a far-away world, Hayes has absorbed from rock music just enough of the contemporary moods that were needed to dissect the ductility of Celtic folk into a compositional style that ranges from Steve Reich’s minimalism to jazzy “Third Stream”. In the end, he preferred depth to virtuosity. With him on stage are Birkin Tree, the most important Irish folk band in Italy, celebrating their fortieth anniversary this year.

Claver Gold’s hip hop is a sophisticated mix of rhymes, a clever balance of passion, improvisation (in the best tradition of freestyle) and compositional rigour: live narration, urban poetics that moves from intimate, private emotions to encompass the feelings of a whole generation. After making a name for himself on the Italian rap scene with “street” rap and many indie albums, he joined forces with his friend and colleague Murubutu to tackle Dante in a joint album, Infernum.This work won the interest of the general public, captured by Claver Gold’s poetic juxtapositions where everyday life, the primary source of inspiration for hip hoppers, is combined with the darkest and tensest Nordic tales, now tinged by the full colours and unpredictable orchestral mix of classic strings, brass and woodwinds.

“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