DOGLIANI (CUNEO) - The Sanremo Festival next year "will have to be in total normality. Either there will be an audience or nothing. There is no plan B".
Word of Amadeus, conductor and artistic director of the singing festival.
"I want to be positive, not in the sense of the virus - jokes the guest of honor on the second day of the Dogliani TV and New Media Festival -. The 2021 edition will be the number 70 plus 1, the first Sanremo of the post rebirth. Covid - he observes -. An empty Ariston, or with a distant audience, is unthinkable. It would be a problem with the orchestra, with the scenography. And then who tells Fiorello that he can't spit water on my neck? ", He explains. answering the questions of Aldo Cazzullo, signature of the Corriere della Sera.
"I always use the mask and as soon as there is the vaccine I will do it - assures Amadeus -. It serves to return to normality".
The dates of the Festival have already been set, on the agenda from 2 to 6 March, a month later than the usual period, today the priority is music: from the first of September the songs arrive and on 17 December it will be made official, in prime time on Rai1, all the musical cast in competition, the twenty big players and the eight youngsters.
Already from October there will be the evenings of Amasanremo with performances by young people.
Six selected during the broadcast will arrive at the Ariston Theater, plus two from Area Sanremo.
"Last year I listened to 845 songs by young people, almost 300 by big names that this year will be 500", says the conductor, who recalls Pippo Baudo's advice - "you have to know all the songs by heart, you have to make them yours" .
And he does just that: he listens to them hundreds of times, everywhere.
The choice is important, because "a song from Sanremo must remain as long as possible on the radio and on the web, as happened this year with those of Diodato, Gabbani, I Pinguini Tattici and Lamborghini".
Amadeus, who from 13 September will return to Rai1 with I soliti ignoti, talks about his apprenticeship between local radios and Radio Deejay with Claudio Cecchetto.
Then the arrival on TV after a six-hour stakeout to wait for Vittorio Salvetti, patron of the Festivalbar at the Verona Arena.
He talks about the dark moment of 2006 at Mediaset, when the phone didn't ring anymore, and he doesn't skimp on the jokes about the passion for Inter, of which the conductor has been a lifelong fan.
The encore in Sanremo makes him proud: "Sanremo is the national team, it's like playing the World Cup final, you can get out of it very well or very badly. It is also important to be an artistic director, because you have to take on all the responsibilities for what happens".
And then there is the relationship with Fiorello: "We have known each other for more than thirty years, there is a great mutual trust, in the last edition of the Festival we went on the air without knowing anything about each other".