«It's almost impossible to talk about Ornella».
This is how Paolo Fresu begins in his memory of Ornella Vanoni, shared a little while ago through a press note. The two artists have been linked by a long personal and professional partnership, which began, as Fresu himself recalls, in the nineties, when they met for the first time at the Tangram in via Pezzotti, a historic Milanese venue frequented by musicians and artists.
«Write something, I ask myself on this empty November morning. And I'm here throwing scattered thoughts into a Word sheet thinking about how many times we have laughed, cried, sung and played in these thirty years.”
He continues: «It is impossible to outline a rich life made up of successes and triumphs, falls, ascents and passions.
Write something, but what? Perhaps the best way is to find adjectives. Contemporary screenshots that are capable of translating the image into the collective imagination of her being a woman and an artist which, she always knows, belongs to all of us. Ornella is the emotion of life. His and ours.”
A life, and an emotion, that Vanoni would have liked to end with his friend still at his side, as in the past. In 2023, a What's the weather like? he had declared that, among the arrangements for his funeral, there was the presence of Fresu and his music, which he would have liked as the soundtrack of the moment.
Then «the clock announces that it is time to leave for Milan», writes the musician, who talks about the difficulty of doing justice to “his” Ornella in just a few words. «She was shaking like a leaf before going on stage which she then faced like a lioness. Or the weekly phone calls with his unmistakable voice that always began with “how are you doing?”, or the ones with my mother or with my wife Sonia. And also her undressing with her eyes the people she didn't like so as to put them in difficulty, the concert given in solidarity in the courtyard of the Pavese schools where my son attended primary school or the concert in the lawn of Fabrizio de André's house at six in the afternoon where she, barefoot, said, “I've never had the chance to sing at snack time”.
And here we come to the story of the request, which arrived already in 2020: «In May 2020, in front of the same school as my son, he asked me on the phone to ring at his funeral. On that bright morning our friendship strengthened even more until, a short time ago, she asked me to be accompanied by the hand to the awarding of the Honorary Degree. Now I'm on a Frecciarossa speeding through the Po Valley fog. I reopen the computer realizing that I should write more but my thoughts are too crowded. Perhaps we should simply fly among the words and in the memory of his music between Brecht and Vinicius, Tenco, Fossati and Paoli.”
Fresu concludes his letter thus: «Ornella has flown all her life. Sometimes burning his wings but always getting back up and soaring higher and higher. Exactly like we do every time we listen to his wonderful and unmistakable voice. The last time it happened in Bologna in March when, in The Man I Love arranged by Celso Valli, it sounded like Billie Holiday. As I enter the Centrale in Milan, his city, I put the computer in my backpack certain that I have not succeeded in my aim. I only know that the world has lost a unique voice that responds, like Raphael, Miles and Vinicius, to a single name: Ornella.”
