During the first Italian Lockdown caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, Vanessa Tagliabue Yorke was the first artist in the world to develop the artistic proposal of the Phone Concert.
With the drama of the cancellation of the concerts and the closure of the places of cultural aggregation, Vanessa Tagliabue Yorke decided to react by calling people directly to their homes, maintaining a personal and concrete touch in the relationship with the public, to keep the musical culture and the hope for a better future full of music. The Phone Concert was conceived by Vanessa Tagliabue Yorke to rediscover, in times of isolation and crisis, the human contact between the artist and the public, in an intimate and personal relationship, as happens in listening to a real, protected concert therefore in its fragility and amplified in its magic through the respect of some small indications that create an ideal curtain which opens and leads on the stage of the telephone theater. Whoever answers must only say the word “Tostapane!” which is a magic word, a curtain that opens on a mutual complicity between the artist and the public.
After the concert, as in the best American recording tradition of the 1930s, a voice will be heard saying “That’s all!” and that warns of the end of the performance.
Over the course of 2020 Vanessa has performed more than 300 telephone concerts around the world, sometimes as a birthday present for a distant and impossible to reach friend, as a wish for an old grandmother residing in a city in another country, or maybe as a serenade to a confined girlfriend, waiting alone in a foreign country because of the general Lockdown … People listened and were moved, grateful, sometimes silent and shaken by emotion or sometimes crying tears of joy.
The voice on the phone told them a story of hope and beauty, of community and empathy.
“Tostapane!!!”
If you would love to book a Phone Concert, please do write an e-mail to: