Le Orme took a two-year break and spent it learning new instruments. Pagliuca put down the keyboards and synthesisers and went to perfect his piano and harpsichord. Tagliapietra took up the cello. Serafin started studying the violin. Dei Rossi went to orchestral percussion. Then, in 1979, to the considerable surprise of their audience, they made a record with what they had learned. Le Orme had been contaminating their music with classical writing since Collage in 1971, but no change they ever made was as drastic as this one.

The short version

Florian was released in 1979 and is entirely acoustic. Aldo Tagliapietra sings and plays cello and guitar; Tony Pagliuca plays piano, harpsichord and harmonium; Michi Dei Rossi plays vibraphone, glockenspiel, marimba and assorted percussion; Germano Serafin plays violin, acoustic guitar, bouzouki and mandola. Seven tracks. No electric or electronic instrument anywhere. It is a quartet record — the famous trio had not been a trio for some years by this point — and Serafin’s violin is one of the things it is built on.

The name

The Caffe Florian is the oldest and most famous cafe in Piazza San Marco, and the four of them here amount to a little orchestra of the kind that plays in that square — which is where the title comes from, and why the photograph inside the original gatefold was taken standing in front of the place. The album opens with an instrumental of the same name and closes with another, El Gran Senser, dedicated to traditional Venetian wisdom. The pair of them frame the record and show off the playing more plainly than anything else here.

The sound

Unplugged, decades before anyone used the word: close to folk and at moments to something more like world music, made with vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, violin, mandola and bouzouki. It is a Renaissance and classical-oriented album and an extremely beautiful one. This was not accident but position — the band watched the commercialisation of Italian music with real bitterness, and the bitterness became a musical protest: the electric and electronic instruments were simply set aside. It put them about as far as possible from where popular music was in 1979, divided between punk and synthetic textures.

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The songs

The title track is five minutes of pure gentleness turned into music: light notes, quick touches of bowed strings, melodies bounced from piano to xylophone, and a gorgeous central opening given to the piano. One reviewer calls it a masterpiece outright and rates it above anything the band had done before. Calipso is where Serafin’s violin is exceptional and it is the other piece listeners name first. Il mago is the one that drifts furthest from Europe. Fine di un viaggio and the rest fill the record out, and El Gran Senser closes it. The words are as considered as the playing, though it takes some listening to catch them.

Reception and legacy

It won a critics’ prize, and it sold decently rather than enormously — the forty-eighth best-selling album in Italy across all of 1979, which is remarkable given how little the thing was designed to be consumed. Prog listeners have been harder on it than critics were, and one defender says flatly that he has heard it put down for far too long and cannot accept his peers’ verdict, calling it his favourite Le Orme record. The honest reservation is the obvious one: it may bore anyone expecting something as complex and powerful as Felona e Sorona. It is not less rewarding, but it is asking for a different kind of attention.

The verdict

Worth it, and worth it most if you already know the famous ones. Florian first, the whole five minutes. Then Calipso for the violin. Then El Gran Senser. Play it quietly, late, with headphones — it rewards that and punishes anything less. A band who had gone to number two in Italy with a science-fiction suite spent two years learning cello and violin and came back with an orchestrina from Piazza San Marco. Whatever else that is, it took nerve, and nobody was asking them to do it.

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