Luca Minnelli in an unprecedented live concert in Malta
From serenades at Gondola in Venice to collaborations with the big names of world music such as Brian May of Queen, and recently with Lady Gaga, Maestro Luca Foffano aka Minnelli is according to the well informed the star the next real great of Italian opera and pop, the only one able to collect the testimony of Andrea Boccelli, so much so that the author of Con te partirò Francesco Sartori declared that his story and his voice were a new source of an inspiration to him.
Minnelli spent the last two years of Covid-19 preparing himself, recording and mixing in the best studios together with the best international musicians, to arrive in the spring to excite and talk all over Italy with his songs, albums his, his touree. a blockbuster, even a book: and the just-released hit single on the web with guest star May is just a taste.
We met him, we wanted to get to know him and recognize him before everyone else: because surely in a few months he will be in every newspaper… before his live concert in Malta on Saturday 19 November at the Eden Arena, Intercontinental Hotel .
Luca, how was your passion for music born and what are your influences?
I have loved music since I was young, especially opera because my parents loved it a lot, and since then I understood, always feeling it with them, that I wanted to dedicate myself to this in life. My favorites were Pavarotti, Carreras, Domingo, all the great voices in short. But I was a versatile listener: I also really loved Queen, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin… I used to listen to them and sing obsessively with my friends. So since I was a child, while I was studying and then graduating and starting to work, I committed myself to learning to sing and play different instruments, and with some friends I started a band; we did both covers and our own songs, ranging from many musical genres. A street that passed through the 80’s and 90’s, between local music competitions, piano bar evenings, street parties, and singing lessons from the world famous soprano Michela Remor, until what I can consider the my true self performed in 2004, when I started singing serenades on a gondola in Venice, it achieved an unexpected and remarkable success that took me almost everywhere in the following years, making me one of those Italian artists much more active, known and appreciated abroad with us, with many international collaborations behind us that I remember with emotion, like the one with Dionne Warwick to name just one.
Here I would like to deepen your special relationship with the magical and romantic city of Venice, with its canals and gondolas …
In this regard, I would like to say that the gondola is as much the symbol of Venice as the lion and something that saddens me is that if one goes to Venice today he finds that all the gondoliers put the gondola not in the water but on earth because they have no more work. The singers of the gondola serenades are in great difficulty, like many of us singers specialized in live evenings in general: this category remained for a long time without the possibility to perform and earn, and without any help Venice itself is a city that wants to show the world all its art and beauty and Covid-19, by removing it from tourism, has sent it into a terrible crisis: the world of those who work in the restaurants, hotels, bars suffered a terrible blow. from what has not yet recovered, and this makes me suffer because with Venice as I rightly said; I have a very strong emotional relationship.
Let’s go back to the music: from the gondolas of Venice you descended on an international career that made you sing all over the world in the last 20 years…
Yes, I really spread a lot geographically, from America to Russia, think that the new turn my career took comes from a concert I did in Abu Dhabi, in the Emirates, where I met my current manager, Franco Trevisiol , a very particular person. figure, because he was not born as a music manager, he became one for me. He is an entrepreneur, with a degree in psychology and a lover of music and art, and when he heard me he fell in love with my voice and proposed me to set up a dream together, become my manager, create a label, called Voice and music, and make albums and tours that strengthened my talent as he thought it deserved, because he believed I could aspire to much more. I thought and decided to dream with him, and from there everything I did and am preparing in the last two years comes from: I thank Franco because he pushed me to believe more in myself and in my artistic possibilities, to be more ambitious, which is already giving important results and I would like him to take us soon to the Sanremo festival among the big names.
How did you go about making this dream come true, this new adventure?
In these two years we have been very active: if the global Covid-19 was a catastrophe that brought a lot of suffering and death, and also many problems to the world of entertainment, at least but that you could not sing live, we will have to wait and we give up so many scheduled concerts, it gave us the opportunity to spend all the time preparing ourselves very carefully: we are very perfectionists, and we wanted that for the launch of this new solo project of mine, for which I took the pseudonym by Luca Minnelli (another tribute to Venice, because the Minnellis were a local noble family from the time of maximum Venetian splendour, but I don’t mind if someone instead thinks of Liza and Vincente), everything was done impeccably. So we started looking for important people in the world of entertainment to collaborate with, and in fact the ensemble we put together on a musical level is exceptional. We have already recorded two CDs, which will be released soon, which we recorded partly with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra led by Maestro Diego Basso in the same studio in the Hungarian capital used by all the big names including Disney, and partly in one of the best studios in the world.
Italy, that of Ron in Garlasco, to then be mastered in New York by Sterling Sound, who are number one in the world, with songs signed by names such as Francesco Sartori, the author of “Con te partirò” and other songs by Boccelli, and in which musicians from the bands of Vasco Rossi and Renato Zero play: my philosophy is that either things are done in a super professional way or they are not done properly. Just think of the first single released, “Forever and Ever with You”, written by the well-known Venetian producer and composer Stefano Panizzo, alias Steven Tibet, where the guest stars are the star of the Broadway musical Kerry Ellis and especially Queen’s Brian May, whose myth I grew up with.
Actually this was a point I wanted to get to: how was the human relationship with May?
Here, this was a good dream. We were together for seven days, and he is a wonderful person, of exceptional humility and affability, but of great culture. At that moment I discovered that he also has a degree in astrophysics, and this makes us understand a lot the uniqueness of his person in my opinion. A great friendship grew between us, and there is an episode that I want to tell because it is very beautiful and makes sense. It happened that with my manager Franco I wanted to get a gift for him, and what can you give a man like this, who already has potentially everything? So in Austria they bought him two spinning tops, just the game for the children, of course he spent very little: May was moved, he told us that this gift made him go back to his three or four years, and that for this it would be always. grateful He will never forget it. Even if we gave him a real plane he wouldn’t be so happy. I believe that this gift, by touching particular keys of the human soul linked to childhood, created a particularly strong bond between us, similar to those that are sometimes created when we are children and that often last throughout our lives.
A really good story, as is the wonderful single with May, which came out with an excellent response on YouTube a month ago. If Covid-19 allows, what are the dates of the next releases, and beyond?
The first thing she carried last February was a book of interviews about my story, the result of several meetings with a RAI journalist, which will be published by Male Edizioni, and which we will present on several television stations. The twelve-track album, on the other hand, will be released at the end of March, accompanied by the second single “La voce è musica” which is written by the aforementioned Francesco Sartori of “Con te partirò” and “Aria” by Gianna Nannini. Among other things, Sartori fell in love with my voice and told me something beautiful, that is, knowing myself and my life was an important source of inspiration for him. So our tour took place in late spring, which was very special. We didn’t want to be like Boccelli, for example, who has an orchestra behind him: our musicians were instead almost hidden, while we the audience saw a gigantic specially made video, which in my opinion has wonderful thematic ideas, as well as dancers. and a light show.
On each date there were guests of high level musical honor, both national and foreign: a kind of gift to the spectators, in the style of Zucchero with his jam sessions. All this was followed by a winter tour in the theaters, which is going towards the goal of participating in the next Sanremo: to reach that goal and jump will be our challenge this year, as I prepare for -my big concert, together with my band, in Malta. thanks to Dynamic Events Limited, who worked hard to make this concert possible.
Interview conducted by Umberto Baccolo, translated from Italian by Martin Vella