He gave the popular soul the nobility of the classic, and to folk a new season from Evergreen. Roberto De Simone has combined in his artistic experience The languages of studies And those of observation, the lessons of the greats of the past and a new and in -depth sensitivity towards the traditional repertoire, which he knew how to dress with inventiveness without distorting his authenticity.
He was an all -round musician, a theater author who went beyond the theater, a show man without chasing the spectacularization of his creations. Born in 1933, to the black and white of the piano, he approached just six years, and at the keyboard he gave the colors of the interpreter and the musicologist, then breaking the boundaries between genres and styles: Mozart, Beethoven and the Conservatory to get to the languages of universality, Naples to travel the thousand streams of a stratified, original, unmistakable culture in the time.
From the great classic authors to the classics of the song
De Simone immediately caught the qualities not totally expressed by tradition, beyond the types of postcard illustrated, hugging those that were now typical and overwhelmed characters in their reiteration. An electrocution that led him to the meditated and happy choice to abandon the classical music As a concertist, for which he had already shown abundantly that he had the fabric well before obtaining his diploma at the San Pietro in Majella Conservatory, to travel other roads: those less beaten and more intriguing for his intellectual curiosity. He would have dealt with his music by inserting it in his Neapolitanity, rediscovering the production of the Neapolitan school and innervating it with original scores for TV and for the scene, also collaborating with the always regretted Scarlet Orchestra of the Rai of Naples, and opening to that extraordinary laboratory of ideas and projects that was the New Popular Singing Companywith Eugenio Bennato, Carlo d’Angiò and Giovanni Mauriello, and then also with Peppe Barra. From that crucible the repertoire of the south re -emerged with a strong charge of relived energy, bringing back into vogue Forms confined to localisms such as Pizzica, Tarantella and Tammuriata.
The refusal of stereotypes and the applause to Pino Daniele
Polyiedric both in the formation and in the interests, De Simone looked at with increasing attention to the theater, as a director, whose “Cinderella cat” cats, a work based on the fairy tale of Giambattista Basile, who made it become a repertoire classic. He ferried the Neapolitan song beyond the dryers of the stereotypes, indicating new directions to popular habituality and breaking down the bars of the Olaography and conformism. It is no coincidence that he saw a important and original voice of the Neapolitan soul that was expressed with the languages of modernity in the music of Pino Daniele. That same Neapolitanity that had already identified Igor Stravinsky visiting a city that he felt he loved deeply, making it drag and conquer, and that somehow paid homage to his “pulcinella”.
Culture alive against traditional tradition
Of Simone was against the Neapolitanity exhibited As a business card, artifact passepartout, or the plaster of a tradition that was mentioned without knowing it and without sharing it in the sign of belonging. Neapolitan culture was, and it is, low and high at the same time. Son of the twentieth century, he crossed the short century and ferried his way of understanding the artistic and cultural humus of a people in the second millennium as if he had to testify how good he had been done and how much there was still to be done. He never satisfied himself with the richness of the oral tradition and went in search of the culture terrain of history, supporting the folk to be lived to the Madrigali to understand, such as those of Gesualdo da Venosa, in the same way that he signed original music and the royal fittings for the works of Giuseppe Verdi, Gioachino Rossini, and the always loved Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The music belonged to him because he studied it and made it the object of research, studies insights. He has dismissed from his Naples and earthly life at 91 years old, and there is no applause in his release of the scene that he can fully underline his greatness.