I would like my music to be like my voice: not necessarily beautiful, but true. A voice marked by time, full of wrinkles. All the languages I have touched are those wrinkles
(Vincenzo Germano)
It starts with an impossible encounter between a cyclist from times gone by and a contemporary director, or rather between a champion of vintage cycling, like the unforgettable Luis Ocaña, and a provocative filmmaker, like Gaspar Noé. Two apparently distant souls, who however end up idealizing a glaring tension, before dissolving in a cascade of sounds that bounce in an ending worthy of a track industrialenriched, mostly, by a very gloomy piano line and an equally virulent sax.
The beginning of “Teatro Armónico”, the new album by Opera 23, the stage name of the Italian composer based in Madrid Vincenzo Germano, is surprising, yet revealing of a complex work, explaining a figurative interior habitat where apparently irreconcilable findings can be left floating in the air, for a decidedly unique alchemy, whose title is inspired by the Teatro Armonico of the seventeenth-century composer Giovanni Francesco Anerio, an intended space, according, in fact, also to the words of Germano, “not as a physicist, but as a mental and human architecture: a place where different thoughts, ideas and sensitivities can coexist peacefully”.
The eight scores of the album are played by Vincenzo Germano himself (electric bass, double bass, electronics, composition), Moisés P. Sánchez (piano), Iván García Redondo (bass clarinet) and Ludowic (trautonium and synthesizers in “Armónico”).
Presented at the Medinaceli Jazz Festival (premiere, October 2025) and at the Teatro OffLatina in Madrid (sold-out, February 2026), with coverage on Radio Nacional de España, MásJazzDigital and La Estrategia del Caracol, “Teatro Armónico” melts the soul modern classical of Opera 23 and its more deconstructionist spirit, in an embrace that enraptures the senses and elsewhere consoles, as in “La caja viajera”, with the double bass and the piano dancing lightly on a cloud full of water, thus metaphorizing a restrained feeling, but at the same time a constant figure of a work that finds its balance in the seven minutes of “Religiously” free from of the circle, while coordinateless flourishes of the bass clarinet subjugate the eardrums and the electronic part, wisely managed by Germano, recreates a sci-fi bag of Eden in the background. And again the scant twelve minutes of “Hymno”, which stand out among indecipherable speeches, absurd zigzags of the electric bass and “on stage” entrances of the piano which grace an otherwise lunar atmosphere.
The pathos it is not missing even in the slightly “dadaistic” episodes, such as in “Robota (La caja de lata)”, once again dominated by Sánchez's enchanting pianism, at least in the first part, given that the second is a mad chase towards a kind of proto-funk as futuristic as it is deconstructed. Finally, a certain stasis also emerges, perpetuated by the legendary trautonium played by Ludowic, i.e. the monophonic invented in Berlin in 1930 by the physicist Friedrich Trautwein, which reigns sweetly in “Armónico”.
We could continue by quoting the dark score that emerges in “Talking about relativism”, before everything changes into a song instrumental hip hop (!). Just as one could reel off the usual series of parallels, ideally ranging from Vlasislav Delay to Fennesz. It would, however, be a convenient escape route, to “badly” quantify a chameleon-like, elusive, unique and lovably inspired album, which confirms the absolute depth of Vincenzo Germano, alchemist and thespian of a sound staging to listen to and listen to again, allowing oneself to be amazed at each renewed turning point.
07/28/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
