Vasco Rossi - L'altra Metà del Cielo (2012)

While Vasco Rossi is yet another in a long line of veteran rockers who decided to make an album with symphonic versions of his own songs, one must allow that his project is more original than most. L'altra Metà del Cielo is actually a ballet score for Milan's world-famous Teatro Alla Scala, with choreography by Martha Clarke. The ballet, inspired by Rossi's portraits of women, follows the lives of three female characters through four periods of their lives: adolescence, youth, maturity, and withdrawal. Rossi picks three of his most famous early songs named after women, "Albachiara" (1979), "Silvia" (1978), and "Susanna" (1980), and associates each one of them with other songs from his repertoire. Thus the character Albachiara successively becomes "Anima Fragile"(1980), "Incredibile Romantica" (1981), and "Jenny" (1979); Silvia becomes "Brava"(1981), "Brava Giulia"(1987), and "Laura"(1998); and Susanna becomes "Gabri,"(1993) "Delusa"(1993), and "Sally"(1996). Rossi may have earned his reputation as a loud, defiant rock star, but -- as is often the case -- everyone knows his songwriting is at its best with ballads.
This means that L'altra Metà del Cielo collects several of Rossi's finest and most enduring creations, and the idea of finding common threads throughout these songs is indeed quite clever. Unfortunately, translating ideas into action is never that easy. Judging from the ballet's reviews, the idea and choreography turned out to be, to say the least, pedestrian. Most unsettling of all, the music was not performed live by the Scala orchestra, but played from a CD -- which sort of makes a mockery of having one of the world's greatest concert halls at your disposal. As for the music itself, it only takes 16 seconds into the first vocal track, "Albachiara," the time it takes Rossi to start singing, to realize this may not work after all. For those familiar with the original version of the song, one of the most beautiful and emblematic of 1980's Italy, it would come as an absolute shock that, for the first time on record, Rossi really sounds like an old man, even older than his well-traveled 60 years. It is not that one could not tell that his voice has been aging over the years, or that he is singing badly on this album, it is just that this unfamiliar sonic context cruelly enhances the same unavoidable problem that most of these rock/classical adaptations encounter, namely that Rossi's endearing, gruff voice, perfect for an earnest, ironic rocker, simply lacks enough color and vibrato to ride the orchestra.
The result is often alienating, as if the vocals and music were recorded in two different hemispheres and superimposed on the mix. The arrangements by the renowned Celso Valli (Mina, Andrea Bocelli, Eros Ramazzotti, Laura Pausini) use the full orchestra to enhance the drama, soaring during the characteristic changes of dynamics of Rossi's songs, but their very grandiose nature ends up dwarfing Rossi's voice. Not coincidentally, the best passages are those when Rossi is accompanied mostly by piano, a setting that he is very comfortable with. It should be noted, however, that repeated listening somehow attenuates the impact of the first impression, and one begins to discover the positive aspects of this endeavor. Most of all, that L'altra Metà del Cielo is not a travesty, nor even the umpteenth shameless attempt to sell the same Rossi songs over and over again -- the album went straight to the top of the Italian charts, by the way. Clearly, a lot of thought and work went into the making of this recording, but those efforts are hampered by the reluctance to take the most radical decision of all -- to do away with Rossi's lyrics or vocals. Either as an instrumental album, using a choir (as in "Brava Giulia"), classically trained vocalists, or at least a true crooner in the Scott Walker or Neil Hannon mold, would have made for a quite startling revision of Rossi's music. As an afterthought, a supplementary disc with the instrumental tracks, such as Peter Gabriel's New Blood, might also have done the trick.