Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Udine / Teatro Nuovo Giovanni da Udine / Italy
Concert date: 09.02.2017
Attendance: 800
Udine’s Teatro nuovo Giovanni played host to a music legend of worldwide stature. Rick Wakeman, the English keyboard wizard best known as a member of prog-rock icons Yes, has ranked among the most gifted, original, accomplished and charismatic figures in the music world since the early seventies. Alongside Keith Emerson, Jon Lord, Tony Banks and Richard Wright, he makes up the elite of the most revered keyboardists in rock history. Wakeman, a classically trained player, had already turned heads as a session musician and a member of prog-folk-rock legends Strawbs, but he really made his name with his pioneering work introducing electronic keyboards, while in the first half of the seventies he went on to blow people away with the strikingly innovative idea of combining a rock band with a classical orchestra and choir. Rick’s first three studio albums »The Six Wives of Henry VIII« (1973)«, »Journey to the Centre of the Earth« (1974) and »The Myths and Legends of King Arhur and the Knights of the Round Table« (1975) are, a bit ironically, still his best to this day, which is all the more remarkable when you consider he’s already put out more than a hundred solo albums.
This time Rick headed out on a short tour called ‘Yet Another Evening With Rick Wakeman’, which added up to just four dates in total. One of them was his show next door in Italy, in the very pleasant surroundings of the Teatro nuovo Giovanni di Udine. For the occasion Rick played completely solo, meaning no backing band, on a big Fazioli concert grand, and he needed no sheet music whatsoever, since he can play his masterpieces from memory even if you woke him up in the middle of the night and dragged him out of bed. The still hugely charismatic keyboard grandmaster entertained us between songs with a stream of cheeky one-liners, which he’s never run short of, so it’s no wonder he was the fan-favorite member of Yes back in the day, and that he later kept audiences laughing in his older years on the BBC TV show ‘Grumpy Old Men’. Rick had no problem admitting that the only Italian words he’s picked up over the years are the names of different kinds of pasta.
The other thing Rick loves most besides music is history, which he’s touched on many times on his solo albums, and which he made a point of mentioning that night. From the cult debut he played »Catherine of Aragon in »Jane Seymour« back to back with incredible fire and subtlety. His finely tuned work on the keys was pure poetry for the ears the whole time, and it made no difference whether it was a piano take on the sprawling, complex epic from »The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table« or a ‘rework’ of simpler-to-play The Beatles classics. Rick especially wowed us with his renditions of the unforgettable rock classics »Space Oddity« and »Life On Mars?«, with which he remembered his late friend David Bowie, gone too soon. It was Bowie who, at the end of the sixties, got Rick fired up about writing his compositions on piano first. Bowie followed the logic that if a composition sounds good on the piano, it’ll surely sound good played on other instruments too.
Of course Rick didn’t forget to play some pieces from his time with Yes, which he left no fewer than five times during his career. That night he picked three Yes songs, among them, somewhat surprisingly, »The Meeting« from the one and only self-titled album by the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe project from 1989. A somewhat bigger wave of excitement came with the better-known evergreens »And You And I« and »Wonderous Stories«, which came out especially interesting in its piano version. The maestro’s takes on The Beatles evergreens »Help!« and »Eleanor Rigby« were a nice change of pace for the evening too, while the highlight of the show was a longer section from the epic treat »Journey to the Centre of the Earth«, with which Wakeman closed the regular part of his set in grand style. In fact, he never even left the stage before the encore, instead cracking a joke at the expense of the obligatory-encore tradition, and then launching into »Merlin the Magician«. In the second encore he properly surprised all of us with »White Rock«, which comes from the album of the same name from 1977. That album was the music for a film about the winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, which took place in 1976.
One of the best keyboardists of all time showed, even in a solo set in Udine, that he’s still in a class of his own when it comes to piano renditions of some of the most beloved classics from his solo career and assorted evergreens from rock history. Even though maestro Wakeman played completely solo with no backing band, the individual standards in pure piano form made for a very pleasant and interesting ambient experience that we thoroughly enjoyed, even if Wakeman’s show was, visually, anything but exciting. There was no long silver cape around Rick’s shoulders this time, and after years of battling alcohol addiction he has physically let himself go quite a bit, but at least his hands remain the part of his body he can still be enormously proud of. Even in his later years, Rick is still a remarkably active solo musician who occasionally likes to dive into various side projects. His renewed collaboration with Jon Anderson and Trevor Rabin has stirred up the emotions of everyone who misses the ‘real’ Yes. Rick’s next tour, spanning ten dates on British soil, will promote his new album »Piano Variations« (2017), which even landed Rick’s best chart placement in the UK since 1975, and so brought a big commercial surprise, both for him and for plenty of fans of good music.
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