Giovanni Allevi: Triumph and Pain Through Music

Giovanni Allevi, guest of Vespa: "My future is an expanded present, I do not want to push myself too far ahead," says the artist guest of Bruno Vespa at Cinque Minuti. Returning to live piano performances in Sanremo 2024 after two years of treatment for myeloma, Allevi is engaged in a tour that will take him to stages all over Europe. A few days ago, during the concert at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, he confessed to having severe back pain, ready, however, to drown it in music: "The back pain started right in the middle of the concert, so I said that phrase that is strong, it's tough," he recounts. Giovanni Allevi, return and pains. "The idea that physical pain can be transformed into music is not only a spiritual fact, it is also physical, because when there is the grand concert piano my energy is absorbed, as if the piano were a very soft mattress and then the contractions of the paravertebral muscles dissolve." The illness has multiplied his joy of living, he emphasizes: "Now I try to seize from life all the gifts it offers me, much more than before." As for his degree in philosophy, "at Sanremo I quoted Kant and I was happy, because when I faced the concrete possibility of my end and physical pain the immortality of the soul came back to being a central knot in my thoughts: the immortality of the soul, the great hope or the great illusion of mankind? And so I let myself be enveloped by the words of Kant, in that splendid final page of the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he says that each of us immediately feels that in the depths of our being there is something greater, beautiful, good, preceding our aggressiveness, that transcends our individual story and my physical pain." Allevi also talks about the relationship with his father: "For many years he was my greatest detractor. He is a supporter of the great classical tradition, of symphonism, of Wagner, he saw in my attempt to write new music a sacrilege." Finally, a thank you to "the patients of the Cancer Institute of Milan and to all the people who are going through this very difficult journey: they give me great strength."