Intense weekend in Alghero, the protagonist city of the "Music Festival". On Saturday 24 June in the extraordinary setting of the Nuraghe Palmavera archaeological area there will be the musician Enzo Favata also known on the foreign jazz scene as a saxophonist, composer and author of original music for cinema, radio and theatre. Together with him, the researcher, scientific popularizer and well-known face of TV Mario Tozzi. The duo will present, from 9 pm, the show "Men and Virus".
Favata, how did the idea of creating this project with Mario Tozzi come about?
«Mario Tozzi and I have known each other for 20 years. We met at the Perfugas festival "Mille e un Nuraghe" and from that moment on we started to feel each other, up to the idea of creating a real collaboration. The first project carried out together was the one dedicated to Atlantis, or to Sardinia, the second to the "Mediterranean, origins of the Myth" and the third, the one that will be represented within the Music Festival, has as its object the relationship, precisely, between “Men and Viruses”. The idea comes from his successful book based on how the virus has had effects on humans. In the show, Mario Tozzi talks about the virus by putting himself in the guise of the virus itself and recounting its effects, over the centuries, and what it has determined on the Earth, also contributing to its evolution. It is a show which, despite being ready since 2020, had to wait to be proposed and this precisely because we were still in the midst of a great pandemic and that was a difficult period for us given the impossibility of doing our job as well as possible, i.e. have contact with the public. We waited a year and then in agreement with our promoters we resumed doing live shows making our debut in Rome in September 2021, but since the pandemic was still "fresh" we waited another year to restart at full capacity with also the return to Alghero » .
What should the public expect?
«If I had to make an extreme synthesis, it is a show that also has the aim of exorcising the pandemic period and giving a detached view of the viruses that have contributed, willy-nilly, to the evolution of the earth. As far as our presence on stage is concerned, the audience should expect something different from the usual. Two people who improvise and create a film where the images are what is proposed by music and words and not by real images, also to mark a difference from today's world dominated by superficiality, social media and tik tok. Furthermore, Mario Tozzi has in his speech, even when he appears on TV, a marked musicality that emerges entirely in the show, while I, unlike on other occasions, dedicate myself to creating bases and atmospheres through the use of electronics. We could also appear as a jazz duo improvising, after all for me if Mario were a musician he would certainly be a trumpet player».
What is the state of music today?
“Music is fine, even if it travels differently. Let me explain, it's as if so-called commercial music is a two-stroke motorbike, while the rest of the music is a diesel which, however, despite the apparent slower diffusion speed, crosses and breaks down barriers and borders. This without being contemptuous or hypercritical, but it is evident that the first often vanishes in the short term, while the other manages to live longer and this is also thanks to the live performances and shows with the public which, finally, after the harsh pandemic period have been re-proposed. Always to confirm what, like it or not, is an eternal relationship between “Men and Viruses”».