OPERA 23 - Teatro Armónico

I'd like my music to be like my voice: not necessarily beautiful, but true. A voice marked by time, full of wrinkles. All the languages I've touched are those wrinkles
(Vincenzo Germano)

It begins with an impossible encounter between a cyclist from a bygone era and a contemporary filmmaker, or rather between a vintage cycling champion, the unforgettable Luis Ocaña, and a provocative director, Gaspar Noé. Two seemingly distant souls who nevertheless end up idealizing a palpable tension, before dissolving into a cascade of sounds that bounce toward a finale worthy of an industrial track, enriched mostly by a stark piano line and an equally virulent sax.
The opening of "Teatro Armónico," the new album by Opera 23, stage name of Italian composer Vincenzo Germano, based in Madrid, is disorienting, yet revelatory of a complex work that gives shape to a figurative inner habitat where apparently irreconcilable ideas are left floating in the air, forming an alchemy truly one of a kind. Its title is inspired by the Teatro Armonico of the 17th-century composer Giovanni Francesco Anerio - a space understood, in Germano's own words, "not as physical, but as a mental and human architecture: a place where different thoughts, ideas and sensibilities can coexist peacefully."

The eight scores on the record are performed by Vincenzo Germano himself (electric bass, double bass, electronics, composition), Moisés P. Sánchez (piano), Iván García Redondo (bass clarinet) and Ludowic (trautonium and synthesizers on "Armónico").
Presented at the Medinaceli Jazz Festival (world premiere, October 2025) and at Teatro OffLatina in Madrid (sold out, February 2026), with coverage on Radio Nacional de España, MásJazzDigital and La Estrategia del Caracol, "Teatro Armónico" fuses Opera 23's modern classical soul with his more deconstructionist spirit, in an embrace that seizes the senses and elsewhere brings solace, as in "La caja viajera," where double bass and piano dance lightly above a water-laden cloud, metaphorizing a restrained feeling that is nonetheless a constant thread throughout a work which, in the seven minutes of "Religiosamente," finds its own free-form squaring of the circle, while coordinate-less flurries of bass clarinet overwhelm the timpani and the electronic component, wisely handled by Germano, conjures up a sort of sci-fi Eden in the background. And then there are the nearly twelve minutes of "Hymno," which stand out amid indecipherable spoken words, absurd zigzags of electric bass and piano entrances "onstage" that lend grace to an otherwise lunar atmosphere.

The pathos is present even in the less "Dadaist" episodes, such as "Robota (La caja de lata)," once again dominated by Sánchez's enchanting pianism, at least in its first half, since the second is a mad dash into a kind of proto-funk as futuristic as it is deconstructed. Finally, a certain stasis also emerges, sustained by the legendary trautonium played by Ludowic - the monophonic instrument invented in Berlin in 1930 by physicist Friedrich Trautwein - which reigns gently over "Armónico."
One could go on, citing the murky score that emerges in "Talking About Relativism," before everything shifts into an instrumental hip-hop track (!). Just as one could trot out the usual string of comparisons, ranging ideally from Vladislav Delay to Fennesz. That, however, would be an easy way out to unfairly dismiss a chameleonic, elusive, one-of-a-kind and lovingly inspired album, which confirms the absolute depth of Vincenzo Germano, alchemist and showman of a sonic staging to be listened to again and again, letting oneself be amazed with every renewed turn. 

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28/07/2026