In 1973 this record reached number two in Italy and finished the year as the eighteenth best-selling album in the country — ahead of the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. Three men from Venice with no guitarist outsold all of them on their own ground, with a science-fiction concept about two planets. That is the fact people forget about Italian progressive rock: for a moment, at home, it won.

The short version

Felona e Sorona is the fifth studio album, released on Philips in 1973, thirty-three minutes, produced by Gian Piero Reverberi. Aldo Tagliapietra sings and plays bass and guitar; Tony Pagliuca plays organ, Mellotron, piano and Moog; Michi Dei Rossi plays drums. Nine tracks running as a continuous suite. The cover is an oil painting. It is widely called one of the finest examples of Italian progressive rock, and plenty of listeners consider it the pinnacle of everything Le Orme recorded.

The story

Two planets revolve around each other and never touch. Felona is bright and flourishing; Sorona is dark and desolate. A divine being sets out to bring happiness to Sorona as well — and the moment Sorona has light, Felona falls into darkness. The balance holds for an instant and then breaks: what is joy for one is the end for the other. Behind the allegorical science fiction is a work with a strongly spiritual character, which Pagliuca, who wrote most of Le Orme’s words, has confirmed more than once. Tagliapietra’s own gloss is blunter: things are either on one side or the other.

Hammill

Peter Hammill had toured Italy in 1972 and played dozens of concerts with Le Orme, turning up as a regular guest at their sold-out shows. He named a planet: Sorona comes from the English sorrow, his suggestion, which Tagliapietra italianised. Then Charisma — the label of Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator — picked the album up for Britain, and Hammill wrote the English words. They are not a translation. He kept the general lines and then developed the story with complete freedom, and the result is properly his own writing rather than a version of somebody else’s; two of the pieces were even combined. Some copies went out with the planet misspelled on the label.

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The sound

Gorgeous organ and Mellotron-led symphonic prog, and the instrumental work is finished rather than improvised: few solos, a great deal of atmosphere. That is the change from Collage, where the long jams were the point. Here the emphasis falls on piano and on song structure, and the band use sound to its fullest. Sorona is the one that lands hardest — melancholy notes over a bed of Hammond, an absorbing piano improvisation with Moog underneath, and then the synthesiser hands over to Tagliapietra’s deliberately treated voice. Anxiety, anguish, tragedy: it produces real dismay while you listen.

Reception and legacy

By 1973 Le Orme were, with Banco and PFM, the most popular prog group in Italy, and this album is where they crossed the border. Charisma brought them over for a two-week British tour that November and they played the Marquee. It did not sell as hoped abroad, but Pagliuca’s account of what it meant is worth more than the numbers: after years of Italian muffa, he said — mould — with radio playing only new Italian songs and translated foreign hits, to be put in contact all at once with the world where the music was actually being made was an enormous novelty. The one real complaint about the record is affectionate: like everything they did, it is far too short, and it is a let-down when it ends.

The verdict

Essential, and the single best entry point to the whole scene. Play it whole, in order, in one sitting — it is a suite and it does not survive shuffling. Sospesi nell’incredibile opens it and Ritorno al nulla closes it like a ride into space ending in an explosion. Then the English version, which is a different piece of writing rather than the same album in translation. Then Collage, for where it came from, and La Maschera di Cera’s Le Porte del Domani, for the sequel somebody else wrote forty years later because Le Orme never finished the story.

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