Review of performance at Tenco Awards, Sanremo, Italy on 1998-10-24
Repubblica (Italian newspaper), 1998-10-25
- Gino Castaldo
Translated by Manfredi Buonomo (manfredi.buonomo@iol.it)

Costello the enchanteur re-begins from Bacharach

"Music reveals beauty", words Elvis Costello said while, together with
his pianist Steve Nieve was trying in the afternoon on the stage of the
Ariston theatre.
And he surely is to be believed, judging from his always more sophisticated
attitude to search in the form of songs the preciousness of the details
("this is what me and Bacharach have in common", he said), the melodic
nuances of the feeling.
Some of the greatest poets of music still tour around the world and they
often stop at the "Premio Tenco". Yesterday, in the last of the three
nights of the Tenco Award, the task to enchant the audience was given to
Elvis Costello, that once would have called himself a "free thinker",
unliking any stylistic fence someone who would priviledge the freedom of
expression towrds the law of the market.
In a striking set, full of elegant and bittersweet sounds, he played
some of his most important songs, and Shipbuilding was a standout, one
of those jewels that in three minutes that the art of music can
sometimes create. He also performed songs from his recent album written
and realized with Burt Bacharach (and that they will bring in tour
together starting next Thursday in London), Painted From Memory.
At the end Costello called on the stage Roger McGuinn, and together they
performed, improvising, an old song of the Byrds "So You Want To Be A
Rock 'n' Roll Star", to an enthusiastic audience.