PFM - Teatro Carlo Felice, Genova

I’ve waited a long time to see PFM play live and stayed on in Genova for a few extra days following the Black Widow sponsored A Progressive Night for their appearance at the city’s premier venue, the Teatro Carlo Felice. This neo-rationalist style opera house struck me as an incredibly ugly building when I first visited the city in 2014 and I wasn’t a fan of the interior decoration either, though the band sounded really good. With a boarded-over orchestra pit the septet seemed quite far away even from row 12 in the stalls, but I soon found out that sole surviving original member and de facto front man Franz Di Cioccio was able to take full advantage of the empty space. I’d burned the Italian version of the CD of their new release Emotional Tattoos, which came with my English-version double vinyl, and listened to this the night before on my mp3 player in preparation for the concert; they began with Il Regno from that album, which I think is one of the best tracks. They then embarked upon a string of early classics: La Luna Nuova (from L’Isola di Niente, the original version of Four Holes in the Ground for anyone without the Italian releases); a surprising English language inclusion, Photos of Ghosts; Il Banchetto which appears on the second album Per un Amico and also on the first of their Manticore LPs Photos of Ghosts; Dove... Quando... part 1 and part 2, from 1972’s Storia di un Minuto; and La Carrozza di Hans and Impressioni di Settembre (which would become the title track from The World Became the World) also from the debut record. If the performance had stopped at this point I’d have been completely satisfied because the songs and the playing had already exceeded my expectations; this is what I’d waited for. However, the show continued with two more of the best songs from Emotional Tattoos, La Danza degli Specchi and Freedom Square, before the band took a 10 minute break. They recommenced with the Celtic-influenced Quartiere Generale but then moved into territory I was unfamiliar with, Maestro della Voce from the 1980 album Suonare Suonare, one of the only PFM releases I don’t possess and which featured violinist and current member Lucio Fabbri for the first time. This was one of two tracks from the entire evening which I found unsatisfactory but that’s because Suonare Suonare is considered by some to be PFM’s equivalent of ...And Then There Were Three, the first post-Hackett Genesis album, the mark of decline from full-on progressive rock. Normal service was resumed following an introductory explanation to the next piece from Patrick Djivas, who pointed out the importance of classical composers to the PFM sound and they played Romeo e Giulietta: Danza dei Cavalieri which had been covered on their 2013 PFM: In Classic album. The classical theme continued with Mr. Nine Till Five appended with Five Till Nine including their version of Rossini’s William Tell Overture. They left the stage only to return in less than a minute, before the audience request for an encore had even started in earnest, recommencing with their version of the Fabrizio De André song Il Pescatore. This has particular resonance in Genova because De André, regarded as Italy’s best ever singer-songwriter for his mix of Ligurian folk influences with social commentary, came from the city. De André shunned public performance until 1975 but his 1979 tour featured PFM as backing band and allowed them to choose the set list and make the instrumental arrangements. The crowd had been calling out suggestions for what to play and it came as no surprise that part of the encore was the old favourite È Festa (Celebration on Photos of Ghosts) which included an amusing drum duet between Di Cioccio and Roberto Gualdi and some audience participation, encouraged by the PFM front man who was bounding around the entire front stage area (splitting the hall into three sections to chant Se-le-Brescion, as this version of the song is known.) They left the stage to tumultuous applause and even though the house lights came on, the crowd applauded and called for more music and eventually, the band conceded and returned to play what I believe was the theme from the 1966 comedy film L’Armata Brancaleone, the energetic folk-inflected Branca Branca Branca Leon Leon Leon written by Carlo Rustichelli. This was lost on me at the time, though my fellow concert-goers absolutely loved it; it’s been in the PFM repertoire for some time and I found it interesting to note that Carlo Rustichelli’s son Paolo was also a composer-musician, releasing the progressivo italiano album Opera Prima in 1973.
The vocals were primarily handled by Di Cioccio but some of the singing was by Alberto Bravin, who also added keyboards. The main keyboard player, accurately interpreting the early material, was Alessandro Scaglione and filling the shoes of Franco Mussida, who left the band in 2015, was Marco Sfogli. The line-up proved very adept and though there was no flautist the woodwind lines were provided by keyboards; it might also have been good to hear something from Chocolate Kings or Jet Lag, the latter album being a vehicle to showcase Djivas’ excellent bass technique but when you think that they played for over two and a half hours, promoting their latest release but also entertaining us with all the old classics, it was impossible to walk away without thinking that sticking around in Genova for three extra nights had been a good cause for celebration.