UNA VITA UNA BALENA BIANCA E ALTRE COSE

This is my review, exit on " Future City " in 1977 of Stefano testa's lp. ACHAB WILL NOT CAPTURE THE WHITE WHALE 　 "A life, a white whale and other things". This is the title of a new, recently issued, Stefano Testa's LP, edited by DISCOPIU' (Milan). The author is a young singer-song writer from Emilia at his first record experience. The topics and the problems of the work are already clear in the title : the existential ones ( a life ), the ideological-Utopian ones ( a white whale ) and the ones of the memory's scraps and wounds ( and other things ).The inspiration and the literary-musical world of the record lie in this " completely absorbing" and " historically-dialectical" dimension. In this work, the author tries to mediate between the past- present ( memory-reality)and the delusion-future dream ( utopia-new world ), critically filtering his own emotional universe ( rational as well as unconscious ) through the ideology, meant as the projection of a political commitment towards the achievement of a world where the contradiction will not find harrowing and sorrowful spaces. Shouldn't captain Ahab capture the White Whale, nothing could be left for his thirst of glory and for his hope, meant as wish and fight to survive.

The record is divided in two parts. In the first one , entitled " A LIFE "and freely inspired by C.Pavese's works, a soft music with restrained harmony accompanies the identification between the author and Pavese, from the tragedy of the partisan war to the suicide in a shabby hotel in Turin,city of anxiety and fear. This identification gets rid of the ideology and sinks into the existential tragedy always dangling between a naturalistic sadness and the terror of a too traumatic discovery.

The record's second part gathers other pieces among which "The Ahab's ballade", a wonderful fairy-tale , full in harmony and musical fascination, freely drawn from the novel by Melville, that represents a lyrical-musical abstraction of the author's delusion-utopia.

Beside the " White whale", there are other well-done musical tales as " The waking up" and "The God of the railway" ( inspired by a Borges' work ). They are classical, literary projections of memory, a "decadent",but musically inspired, tribute to the Proustian ideology of the "recherche". In its complexity and contradiction, the record is extremely valuable and well-done and represents a positive novelty in which the cultural mediation-synthesis between the existential dimension of memory and of reality and the dialectical world of the ideology-utopia finds a new lyrical and musical singleness foisting on the listeners moments of meditation and mental straining.

In conclusion, even though, sometimes, it follows outdated musical spheres ( Tenco, Paoli ), the work represents a good level accomplishment and distinguishes itself , with sparks of high creative and musical intelligence, in the too often sterile world of the Italian singer-song writers.

giacomo martini rating: five stars