Alice

At the Cavea of the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, Alice steps into the songs of Franco Battiato without the gait of commemoration. “Eri con me – Alice Sings Battiato” doesn't take the shape of a tribute, nor that of the even more treacherous posthumous celebration: it's more of a crossing. A repertoire belonging to someone else that, after decades of artistic and personal closeness, inevitably ends up overlapping in part with her own musical biography.
Alice moves through it almost like a vestal keeper of the flame. She doesn't simply preserve Battiato's memory: she keeps its secret combustion alight, without turning it into a relic. And few, after all, could do so with the same legitimacy. Alice belongs organically to his musical history: interpreter, interlocutor, accomplice, one of the great female voices on whom Battiato exercised that particular maieutic art he had already brought to bear on such irreducible personalities as Giuni Russo and Milva. The Forlì-born singer doesn't approach Battiato through imitation but through her own timbre, with her low register and a tightly controlled delivery that noticeably shifts the perspective. This is also why the melancholy of the evening never tips over into commemoration. It remains instead a kind of haze, a low frequency. Alice doesn't summon a ghost: she sings from a precise position in the present.

The first part of the concert lingers on the less obvious, later corners of the Maestro's songbook, starting with “Da Oriente a Occidente” and “Eri con me”. These are pieces in which the pop form seems to have been progressively stripped away, letting a contemplative, almost metaphysical dimension emerge. Alice approaches them with a composure that at times borders on the hieratic: few gestures, no superfluous theatrics, all the expressiveness entrusted to the slightest inflections of her voice.

Backing her are I Solisti Aquilani, an ensemble of remarkable precision, capable of avoiding both symphonic excess and mere ornamental accompaniment. The strings open and close the harmonic space by working on suspensions. At the piano and on the podium, Carlo Guaitoli builds an extremely measured texture: the piano often becomes the hinge between voice and strings, keeping intact that inner geometry so deeply embedded in Battiato's music.
Gradually, though, the concert shifts gear. After the more intimate rooms come the songs that now belong to collective memory: “L’animale”, “Gli uccelli”, “Segnali di vita”. Sometimes just the opening notes of a melody are enough to trigger a sudden burst of applause from the Cavea, almost like an electric jolt. Alice stays still at the centre of that current, taking it in without any self-satisfaction. Her relationship with the audience has something singularly reserved about it: few words, the occasional smile, a gratitude never turned into rhetoric. When “E ti vengo a cercare” and “La cura” arrive, someone in the crowd shouts that it's “una carezza al cuore” ("a caress to the heart"). A very long round of applause follows. And perhaps that phrase, in its simplicity, pinpoints something criticism risks needlessly overcomplicating: her ability, through her voice, to never assault emotion but to reach it by side roads.

The encore becomes almost a second finale, four songs met with enthusiasm, including the inevitable “Per Elisa”, delivered without any Sanremo-style nostalgia, still nervy, oblique, surprisingly modern. It's precisely in this ability to reactivate what we thought we already knew that “Eri con me” finds one of its deepest reasons for being. There are no real coups de théâtre, nor do they seem necessary. We know the songs, and the words are already settled into memory. And yet familiarity doesn't exhaust their power… something keeps happening to that music every time, passed through Alice's voice, it finds resonance within us again. In the end, what remains is an unexpected form of relief. The great absence stays absent, but his music still has a body, a breath and, above all, a voice.

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