Costanza Alegiani sings Lucio Dalla: The house of my most intimate dreams

By Edoardo Fassio

Moody and committed, lyrical and surreal, declamatory and romantic, Lucio Dalla (1943-2012) has been one of the most emblematic personas and the most beloved voices of Italy’s pop scene. Dalla, who in his first artistic incarnation was a promising jazz clarinetist, had reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter in the mid-sixties. His first ticket to success came in 1966, when he sang at the Sanremo festival (in alliance with Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds!).

Dalla’s fame went beyond national borders; his epic “Caruso” (1986) is still regarded as an international classic, the second-best world-known and most sung Italian song, after Domenico Modugno’s “Nel blu dipinto di blu” (Volare). According to The New York Times, he was “a plain-spoken intellectual,” whose songs “captured both the exuberant spirit of Italian popular culture and the country’s political agony and social turmoil in the 1960s and ’70s”.

Although the Bolognese chansonnier’s creativity spanned a much longer period, Lucio dove vai? (Where are you going, Lucio?), jazz artist Costanza Alegiani’s fourth opus, focuses on a selection of songs recorded in those two decades. The album was presented on March 4, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Dalla’s birth.

Alegiani, a performer and composer skilled in many areas, including folk, poetry, literature, and theatre, is featured with her Folkways Trio (Marcello Allulli on tenor sax and Riccardo Gola on double bass), who shared her fine 2021 work, which took its name, repertoire and inspiration from the seminal label devoted to popular music and culture.

The mysterious, existential title track, the thoughtful utopia, ecologist ahead of its time, of “Anidride solforosa” (Sulfur Dioxide), plus the successful takes on a couple of imaginative stories from the 1973 LP, Il giorno aveva cinque teste (The Day Had Five Heads), “La canzone di Orlando” and “Il coyote”, mark the boundaries of a new, successful achievement for Alegiani. Unlike in Folkways, where improvisational freedom prevailed, this time the Roman performer adheres faithfully to the letter and spirit of the authors (in five compositions, the lyrics are by the poet Roberto Roversi).

The project started almost by chance in 2022, following her appearance in a Rai Radio 3 program for the tenth anniversary of Dalla’s passing. A year of training was worth the mastery of a gentle but nervous, immediate, almost dancing enunciation of the chosen songbook. Humble and competent, skating on syllables, Costanza takes visitors to “an ideal home where I have never lived, but which I have always known, as in my most intimate dreams”.