In Concerto - Arrangiamenti PFM


Fabrizio De André in Concerto - Arrangiamenti PFM is a 1979 live album by Fabrizio De André featuring Italian progressive rock band Premiata Forneria Marconi, also known as PFM, as his backing band, recorded during their successful 1979 tour of Italy and Europe. Built on powerful, complex and carefully crafted rock arrangements, either by single band members or by the band as a unit, the album marked a significant stylistic and musical departure for De André, whose production up to that point had always employed acoustic-based, folk arrangements, occasionally branching into pop but never overtly using rock structures and instrumentation. Upon release, the album became immediately very popular and paved the way for other Italian singer-songwriters for their own transition from a folk style into a more rock-oriented one. The album was followed by a Volume 2 the next year, recorded during the same shows.

Background and overview

De André and the members of PFM had known each other since 1969, when the band, then known as Quelli and mainly active as session musicians, had played on his album La buona novella. In a 1979 interview, as testified in the eighth and last disc of the 2011 8-DVD documentary series Dentro Faber , De André explained that
he was talked into bringing a "rockier" feel to his music by drummer Franz Di Cioccio, guitarist Franco Mussida and, especially, multi-instrumentalist Mauro Pagani, who, although he was no longer a PFM member by then, had played on La buona novella and was still friends with all of the band's then-current members. The Genoan songwriter, who at the time was also suffering from a lack of motivation and stimuli, enthusiastically accepted the band's proposal, and the tour, later immortalized by the two-volume live album, was born.
All of the tour dates were very successful in terms of ticket sales and of popularity, although some of De Andre's early "purist" fans viewed his move into rock as selling out, or simply as De André "pandering" to a more contemporary music style in order to have a broader appeal. However, music critics at the time, comparing the tour to Bob Dylan "going electric" in 1965, lauded the tour itself, and its resulting live albums, for their great originality, and praised De André's audacity in going beyond the commonly accepted "minimal" attitude of 1970s singer-songwriters and "dressing up" his songs in beautiful musical arrangements, which thus became just as relevant as his lyrics.

Track listing

''Fabrizio De André in Concerto''

  1. "Bocca di Rosa" - 4:32
  2. "Andrea" - 5:24
  3. "Giugno '73" - 4:24
  4. "Un giudice" - 3:23
  5. "La guerra di Piero" - 3:30
  6. "Il pescatore" - 3:58
  7. "Zirichiltaggia" - 2:27
  8. "La canzone di Marinella" - 4:02
  9. "Volta la carta" - 3:56
  10. "Amico fragile" - 9:35

    ''Fabrizio De André in Concerto, Vol. 2''

  11. "Avventura a Durango" - 5:20
  12. "Presentazione" - 3:42
  13. "Sally" - 5:05
  14. "Verranno a chiederti del nostro amore" - 5:06
  15. "Rimini" - 5:00
  16. "Via del Campo" - 2:44
  17. "Maria nella bottega del falegname" - 4:37
  18. "Il testamento di Tito" - 6:34

    2012 bonus tracks

The 2012 re-release of both albums, within the 16-CD live box set I concerti by Sony Music, features four bonus tracks entitled "Contestazione Roma PalaEUR" , which consist in various excerpts from a 1980 show in Rome's PalaLottomatica ; in the show, De André performed the same setlist as in the live albums, but he was verbally attacked, jeered and booed throughout by some of the local audience, who, as several other early fans of De Andre's, wiewed the coupling between a singer-songwriter and a rock band as almost sacrilegious, implying a sell-out of the former; large groups of people shouted out "sell-out, sell-out" and "idiot, idiot" between songs. The singer responded by claiming that there are no such things as good ideals and bad ideals, but that ideals are seen as good or bad depending on them being accepted by a majority or a minority of people. Di Cioccio, on his own turn, defended the combination on the ground that PFM were merely functioning as De Andre's backing band for that tour, as opposed to a fully-fledged rock band with their own personality; he then proceeded to introduce the band members, as he did on Volume 2.

Song changes

With PFM imprinting their own progressive rock stamp on all songs, all of the arrangements are notably different from their respective original studio recordings. Some of the changes are subtle, others more radical.

''Fabrizio De André in Concerto''

De Andrè was immediately appreciative of the new slant given by PFM to his songs, to the point that he kept using identical arrangements to PFM's in all of his subsequent tours, up to his very last concerts in 1998, regardless of the musicians he played with. When asked in 1991 by his longtime lighting and theatrical director Pepi Morgia why he kept using the PFM versions instead of his own ones, De André half-jokingly replied: "Belin, because they are so damn good that nobody has ever done any better - and nobody ever will, most of all myself!"

Personnel

The two albums were remastered and reissued several times by Ricordi, BMG and Sony Music, starting from 1995. In 2007, sound engineer Paolo Iafelice, who took care of field recordings for De André's 1994 album Anime salve and later worked as a technical engineer on his posthumous releases, undertook an extensive remix of both albums, by carrying them through a process of "de-mastering" - i.e. going back to the original 1979 tapes and removing all subsequent layers of remastering to obtain a flat transfer of the tapes themselves, then carefully mixing them anew in order to bring out previously obscured details. Also, when originally recorded, some of the songs were sped up for unknown reasons; Iafelice's remix brought all recordings back to their correct speed.

Artwork

Expert concert photographer Guido Harari took all the photos for the artwork. The front cover of both albums is a shot of the audience in Florence taken from above the stage, without De André ; the photo has an orange-red tint on the first 1979 release, and a light green tint on Volume 2. The gatefold cover of the first album includes more onstage pictures of single members, and the album also features a booklet consisting of black-and-white stills of De André and band members relaxing and having fun backstage. The booklet includes, on its second-to-last page, a poem by De André entitled "Blues di altre date" , which he never set to music, written as a letter to Djivas. Two short handwritten parodies by De André are used as captions on three photos:
The 2007 reissue features a reworked sepia-toned band photo by Harari on the front cover, overlaid with "Fabrizio De André & PFM" in a large white type and "In Concerto" in a smaller dark brown type. The booklet within the reissue features all of Harari's photos from the previous issues, and more previously unreleased ones.

40th anniversary tribute concert

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original 1979 live album, a tribute concert took place at Verona Arena on 26 September 2019. It featured Cristiano De André on lead vocals, accompanied by the current members of PFM, plus several guest musicians. The show consisted in a faithful live re-creation of the album and of its second volume, both in their original running order.