The French accordion master comes back to the festival with two events: Saturday 1 August (6.30 pm), at the wonderful Palazzo Fantini, in Tredozio, Galliano will receive the ERF Career Award; while the next day, Sunday 2 August (9.30 pm), at the Arena San Domenico in Forlì he will perform the famous “The Tokyo Concert”, one of his most popular concerts.
Since eleven years every summer, Emilia Romagna Festival has been recognizing great artists who have contributed to changing the history of world music. Over the years, artists such as Luis Bacalov, Uto Ughi, Ramin Bahrami and many others have received the ERF Career Award. This year, also celebrating his fifty-year career, Richard Galliano – a real backbone of world music – will receive the award. The award will be handed over by the artistic director Massimo Mercelli, with whom Galliano will retrace his career, recalling the moments that led him to “rewrite the history of the accordion” as the journalist Francine Couturier said of him. To accompany him, as always, his accordion.
The next day in Forlì, Galliano will give the public one of his most famous concerts, The Tokyo Concert, which can be considered the sum of his poetics. The concert is part of the 2018 Japanese tour, when the accordion master gave three solo recitals at a classical music festival in Tokyo. The second of these concerts was particularly exciting, because of the special atmosphere between the artist and the audience. Hence the idea of publishing the recording of that exceptional evening in CD and double LP format. The album testifies the Galliano’s extraordinary ability to interpret the music of very different musical genres and cultural worlds with great skill and sensitivity: between songs by Debussy and Satie, real classic pieces, re-proposed with the typical style of Galliano, and by other authors such as Piazzolla, teacher and inspirer, at the centre of The Tokyo Concert there will naturally be the pieces of Galliano himself and of that particular genre, the New Musette, of which Galliano is the creator.