Ezio Bosso dead. Mod in the soul ‘without if and without but’: from the expulsion from the Conservatory to Bach and Beethoven lightened by 30 grams per key

“The music is silent. It is based on those very small pauses that create that tension, the wait. “That was how his love for music told him Ezio Bosso, who died last night at his home in Bologna to 48 years old after complications of the neurodegenerative disease he suffered. Pianist, composer, conductor, tireless worshiper of all possible symphonies, scores, musical notes, sixteenth notes or half notes. IS In this quest for perfect sound stillnessClean, deep, Bosso’s classic passion for music to which he had devoted his entire life always seemed to reside. He had started playing very early at the age of 5. I still couldn’t write, but I already knew how to music theory.

“The music is there independently of us, it is in the birds, in the wind, in the silence, in the sea.. And this makes me feel good. I was happier when there was music, “he explained to Domenico Iannacone in a special interview broadcast on Rai3 a few years ago. From Turin, a tram driver father, a working mother at Fiat, loved to say of his own Bosso: “No bourgeois family, but those idealists, of that partisan generation that tried to liberate itself through culture, reading. People who got into debt for books“Ezio, still little, begins to play the bassoon (” nobody played it “)” More than choosing the music, it is the music that chose me, I needed it more than the others “.

Then, around ten o’clock, he went to the Conservatory to graduate in piano. A rude and violent teacher, but also a spatial encounter that leaves you breathless. A gray-haired gentleman who enters the classroom where small boxwood practices, the teacher stuffs himself and the man says: “Okay, why are you screaming?” It was John Cage. Bosso first escapes from the classical institution, then returns to graduate, while at 14 he plays with the Statuto band. Mod in the soul without if and without butEzio “Xico” who “produced too many notes,” he jokingly explained to Rolling rocks the “teacher”, “so much so that after two years they persecuted me”. At 16, however, he made his solo debut on the Lyon stage. And when he was only eighteen years old he began to play all over the world among the most important orchestras (Wiener Kammer Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra). Dials He leads. Makes. Leaning lightly on the keys of that friend and brother piano. Bent almost ninety degrees on the keyboard, Boxwood is lost, confused, and merges with the instrument, its soundboard, its deep echo.

In 2011 the sudden double misfortune. After an operation due to the removal of a brain tumor, he suffers from a neurodegenerative syndrome. However, Bosso does not give even a millimeter. Arched on the piano, live the chords, push to the touch without tenaciously giving the touch of black and white. Bach and Beethoven lightened by 30 grams per key, thanks to a music store in Pietrasanta (Lucca), to allow Bosso not to fight, not to squeeze more energy with those hands, those fingers that become distant roots and appendages of the artist. In 2016 a sinuous and important album comes out: Room 12. And Bosso also takes the stage in Sanremo so that Following a bird, the opening song of each of his concerts, becomes a silent contemplation of the ancient mystery of sound. In 2017, it becomes, even for a very short time, amid rancor, protests, subterfuges that not even in a Shakespeare drama, main director guest of the Municipal Theater of Bologna.

Two months of passions, but then Bosso leaves (“too much stress”), even if Bologna has always remained in his heart. And there, in the middle of the narrow streets near the Santo Stefano church, from the parts where even the teacher Abbado attracted concentration and peace, you could meet the Piedmontese “master” to chat with friends in wine bars and taverns. In September 2019, Bosso finally chooses not to do any more concerts. Two fingers are not responding as they should to scoring commands. The perfect machine leaves the center of attention to become the memory of a timid and precious legend. Very tall Boxwood art gifts, but also “a painful humanity” that brought him closer to everyone’s heart. The Statutes on Facebook remember him, in a photo in which Bosso “mod” when he was very young, wears Rayban and a jacket of order: “Today we lose a friend, a brother, a piece of us”.