Monolith Cocktail Blog

Live Performance Photogallery
Giorgio Lamonica

For the past couple of years the Monolith Cocktail has collaborated with the leading Italian music publication Kalporz, sharing reviews, interviews and other bits from our respective sites each month. Keep an eye out for future ‘synergy’ between our two great houses as we exchange posts.

This month Giorigia Lamonica finds just the right words to capture the, well-intentioned, restrictions experience of a live concert in pandemic riven Italy, with composer, artist and multi-instrumentalist Andrea Laszlo De Simone’s performance at the Teatro Manzoni, in Bologna, on Saturday 24^th October: part of the Express Festival, an event organized by DNA and the Locomotiv Club.

Andrea Laszlo De Simone‘s live performances are always remarkable thanks to a meticulous care of the arrangements and a rich group of well-prepared musicians. What remained most impressive about this concert, however, was not so much the performance of the singer-songwriter or the musicians, which was very good, but the solemn and melancholic atmosphere born from the awareness that everyone (artists, audience, staff) already knew that we were attending the last concert before the closing of the theatres. The last law about a new lockdown had been pronounced a few hours before. I remember well how the people in the audience were sad, weird and pissed off, as well as happy to enjoy the last concert before a long painful stop. I remember the faces of the musicians, concentrated and attentive, but a little off inside. I remember Elisa’s eyes at the box office very well.

Also on this occasion, as I assume in all the previous ones, the whole staff meticulously followed the rules, the number of seats occupied guaranteed a widely reassured distancing, the audience behaved impeccably. But evidently this is not enough; evidently the occasions of “non-essential” contact should be avoided, as if the essentiality of events of that kind is an objective concept.