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Giovanni Zarrella (6th August 2024, Cologne)

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

After I had quite an intense series of concerts in May 2024, there has been quite a break in my coverage. The more, I was happy to be back in that part of the Flyctory.com coverage on 6th August 2024. The concert was a special one. The Cologne Tanzbrunnen hosted a show of Giovanni Zarrella, an artist who I have featured several times in my Songs of the Week. He hosted his Eine Italienische Sommernacht (“An Italian summer night”) show on that evening, referencing to his most recent song releases as well as his ancestry.

This posting comes with 181 major size pictures as part of the concert gallery.

 

Tanzbrunnen – About The Venue

The Giovanni Zarrella concert has been the second time I featured a show at the Cologne Tanzbrunnen. In August 2022, I was happy to bring you the Gipsy Kings and More Than Words show in August 2022 there. The Tanzbrunnen is an open air space, close to and operated by the Cologne Trade Fair. If the open air ground is standing only, it can host over 12,000 people. However, seated shows come with singificantly lower attendance. The Theater am Tanzbrunnen is a covered theater which shares some facilities. For example, I saw eight Rock of Ages shows there in March 2024.

As the venue is located rather at the Northwest edge of the trade fair grounds, you typically walk back to the Cologne / Deutz Trade Fair train and public transport station, from where the connections are excellent. The venue shares a parking garage with the temporary home of the Cologne Opera as well as an insurance company and a TV station. The capacity there may be limited. A few bus lines stop close to the venue as well. However, times are rather limited, especially after the end of the show.

Giovanni Zarrella – About The Artist

Giovanni Zarrella is an Italian musician and TV host. However, he was born in Germany and is more successful in his country of birth than in his country of citizenship. He has been a rather promising soccer talent, playing for the AS Rome youth teams, before moving back to Germany. As part of the 2001 TV talent show Popstars, he was elected to the band Bro’Sis, which released three albums, one of them being a double platinum release in Germany. Zarrella turned solo and as been especially successful when he did a mixture of Italian pop and schlager in the recent past.

In 2019, his fourth album La vita e bella was a double platinum in Germany and a platinum in Austria. His two most recent album releases, Ciao! (2021) and Per sempre (2022) both lead the German and Austrian charts and were Top 3 in Switzerland. Part of this was also caused by him hosting his own TV show in German speaking channels. In 2024, he released two songs, Danza and Fantastico, which remind of the very very successful Italian synth-pop band The Kolors.

 

Giovanni Zarrella – The Show

Surprisingly, the evening kicked off with the local pop act Dari. Unfortunately, even the promoter was rather surprised about it, so that I could not cover his show at all. Giovanni’s show therefor started some thirty minutes than originally announced, at 20:04. The first song was a medley of a short teaser of Al Bano & Romina Power’s Sempre Sempre and Ciao! (a cover of Life is Life by Opus). Unfortunately, the security counted that medley as two songs, so that my photo shift was over after another song, Senza te, a cover of Münchener Freiheit’s Ohne Dich. Thereafter, the audience was boosted by Giovanni’s latest single release Fantastico.

The concert was majorly a mixture of Italian pop classics and Italian language cover versions of international hits. He stated that in other locations he has to attract the people to stand up, while in Cologne, he rather has to urge them to sit down and relax at slower songs. This was for example the case before Piccola e fragile, a Drupi original, which Zarrella’s father used to sing for his wife. A Rocky movie intro lead into Ci Sarai, originally Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann by Nena. In songs like this, Zarrella mixed German and Italian lyrics, so that the non-Italian background could sing along as well. In later parts of the concert, he gave a preview of his Latino-style medley he will perform in his TV in late August or honored Michael Jackson with an English medley of some of his greatest songs.

 

Italian and International Songs

However, there was also his early 2024 single Danza or a duet with “his” The Voice of Germany team member Desirey. Before the encore of the some two hour show, .he performed some Italian classics like Toto Cotugno’s L’italiano or Volare. The spectators could guess the last song before the encore – and Zarrella and his band managed to tease any of the (wrong) guesses by the front rows of the audience. Finally, a full version of Sempre, Sempre concluded the “ordinary” set of songs.

 

 

 

Giovanni Zarrella – The Gallery

Here are 181 major size pictures of the show. They are located in the concert gallery:

 

Giovanni Zarrella – My View

No matter whether Zarrella went down to the people for one song or he thanked the audience and all the technical staff sharing this evening with him – you simply felt in this “Italian summer night” how down to Earth this artist. You just have to like him. Vice versa, his show had a song for any kind of audience, presented in the nice setting of the Tanzbrunnen. Thus, this evening definitely gave great memories to many people on and off stage – I am sure it will motivate many of them to come back next time.

 

Italian Music & Media

Here are all Music & Media postings related to Italy:

 

Concerts (All Around Cologne)

Here are all my Concerts postings related to the Greater Cologne area:

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