Richard Youngs

Galleria Toledo is one of the few cultural havens in Naples capable of hosting a sizeable roster of illustrious guests throughout the year's various seasons. Standing out in the 2008 calendar, among others: Legendary Pink Dots, Rhys Chatham, Tom Verlaine, Smog, and, indeed: Richard Youngs.

Armed (so to speak) with piano, guitar and toy accordion, the eccentric Glasgow composer gives three shy little bows to the attentive Neapolitan audience before starting, settling timidly onto his stool. From the very first lines, it's easy to sense his clear intention to "hush" the entire room by drawing on the most classic minimal dirges, rendered utterly bare by the solo performance.

Chords wrenched from his own soul, abruptly muted, or placed on tedious acoustic steps, harmonize the whole set. A melodic unease that is fully reflected in a voice that is gloomy, calm, intense, radiant, subdued, damnably alive. Glimpses of the unconscious jotted down on paper in some hotel room, arranged in confused fashion on a stand, chosen with anxious fervour according to his current mood, and recited cabaret-style, alternate with brief acoustic and/or piano performances. The latter, moreover, pared down even further: indeed, the Scotsman works the piano for just three compositions, which are nonetheless enough to create brief moments of intense, dizzying minimalism in the small gallery.

Plundering various tracks from "Autumn Response, "Sapphie", "Advent", Youngs stays on stage for just sixty minutes, delivering, in any case, an evocative and in some ways courageous "concert", both for the skeletal reworking of his models and for the sheer vocal rendering of his torments.

It must be said that not everyone left at the end of the evening fully convinced by the emotional aftermath of the show, yet a sense of pure wonder still showed on their faces, no doubt sparked by the barely sixty minutes that stood out as the most unusual moment in Galleria Toledo's rich programme.

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