You have to agree that acoustic music often becomes very sentimental. What better country to fully exploit that sentimental value than Italy. Hence the concert held at the Teatro Metropolitan in Palermo, Sicily on 1st December 1994 became something special, something from the heart. Luckily Sicily didn’t live up to its name, so they left Steve Hackett’s nylon strung guitar untouched until it was time for the master himself to deliver the magic from his instrument.

It’s an audience you would die for, especially if you’re an artist like Hackett about to deliver very fragile guitar compositions that can each be seen as small individual concertos. In fact, you can hear a pin drop, which is how it should be all the time: respect for the artist by an audience who is there to witness the beauty of the artist and his mistress: the music! Two guitar chords into “Horizons” and the crowd already anticipates with a polite but heartwarming applause. Prior to “Time Lapse In Milton Keynes” Steve addresses the appreciative crowd in Italian, a very professional move indeed!

After about five songs, Steve is completely warmed up and confident and introduces keyboard player Julian Colbeck, a guy I met during the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman & Howe tour several years ago. Julian adds soft textures on top of which the maestro of "flageolets" does his thing. Their first encounter together is “Kim," Steve’s musical gift to the love of his life, Elizabeth Kimball de Albequrque Poor (hope I have it right this time!) A delightful song certainly has to be “Second Chance” which has Julian’s crystal-clear "chimes" shine in all their glory. Then again, those keyboards form an ominous sounding curtain during “Walking Away From Rainbows,” which has the guitar sound like a lost child in a huge forest.

Hackett knows his classics as he tackles Vivaldi’s “Concerto In D (Largo)” with great flair and ease. He then switches from guitar to harmonica as he wants the audience to hear his blues offensive called “A Blue Part Of Town." The "normal" set ends with a great rendition of “Ace Of Wands,” with Colbeck taking in most of the melodies. Of course Steve and Julian are called back on stage again and to extra underline the Italian context, they have opted for a Morricone love theme called “Cinema Paradiso” from the film of the same name. This song, to me, comes across as powerful as John Williams’ “Cavatina” (theme from The Deer Hunter) and it would be nice to hear this song with Steve being accompanied by a small string quartet. After a long and tiring applause session, Hackett closes his performance with the solo spot “End Of Day” which once again illustrates the technical skills of the maestro.

In the I Know What I Like book, Steve Hackett explains to writer Armando Gallo his decision for leaving Genesis: "musical identity is the problem because I’ve got a very wide range of things which pull me off in different directions. There is a whole classical side, whereby I could do a whole convincing album of sort of sixteenth or seventeenth century pieces. Even though I have never, in this lifetime, learnt musical structure as such, I have had one or two classical people in high positions say that they find some of these compositions that I write within a certain style quite faultless, in fact, or as good as if they were taught. People don’t usually think that they are mine. I owe something to the feeling of being able to play that kind of music, which has a tranquility and a calm about if very different from today’s speed of things’. To me it’s exactly that attitude which has kept Steve Hackett alive during all the musical turmoil of the last twenty years and this album perfectly illustrates his great talent. Grazie mille!