Aurora

After the homonymous first album (2013) which celebrated AURORA LUNARE of the 70s, and the interlocutory “Translunaggio” (which paid homage to important progressive bands), the band from Livorno returns with “Terzo Luogo”: seven totally new songs, which contain the magic of a past (clear echoes of the historic Italian progressive) that has been able to renew itself brilliantly, with surprising freshness! “Terzo luogo” (Third place) as a middle ground between life and death, forgiveness and damnation, hell and heaven, the human and the divine, like a “third eye” capable of reading the subconscious.

Scion of one of Italy’s most musical 17th-century families, Giovanni Bononcini became such a force in an era when the oratorio was king that he rivaled Handel in popularity across the continent. Venturing from Italy to England and back again, Bononcini was branded something of a political malcontent, though the music heard in this set has all of the political dogma of a John Clare poem: which is to say, none at all, a music of mead and meadow, an image that I assume the sylphs on the booklet’s cover are meant to conjure in their contented gazes.