It is not easy to tell a war through the eyes of someone who does not brandish a weapon, but a musical instrument. Yet it is precisely from this gaze - full of respect, awareness and grace - that Paolo Fresu, a world-famous trumpeter born in Berchidda, manages to trace a different narrative of his experience in Kiev. A narrative made of sounds, silences, gestures and glances, which insinuate themselves between the sirens of air raids and improvised shelters, in the cafes that resist and in the hands that tremble but do not stop.
"We spent part of the night in the hotel shelter, which is nothing more than an underground car park," Fresu says during a break before the concert he will hold this evening in a 350-seat hall that is already packed, where representatives of the Ukrainian government, the international community and, above all, many ordinary citizens will be present. "There were makeshift beds, sofas, a corner for water and coffee. Many people slept there, used to this. We only came back up after an hour, when the alarm stopped."
It is not the first time that war is told through music, but in this case it is music that tells the story of war. Or, better yet, that tries to say what words cannot. Kiev is a city crossed by a strange normality, where life seems to continue as usual, but beneath the surface you can sense something suspended, something cracked. There is a curfew that starts at midnight, alarms that sound via app, maps that change color hour after hour. "You observe people while they eat at a restaurant during an alarm: they don't move. They live this condition with a resilience that is intertwined with a profound resignation. The Italian ambassador Carlo Formosa also told us: there is a resignation among the people, but it is not passivity, it is a way of staying standing".
Fresu’s journey began overland, passing through Moldova, crossing the border above Odessa, skirting villages marked by poverty, where the trenches can still be seen . “At one point we stopped to let a funeral pass. It was clear that it was a young boy, returning from the front. At another point I saw a newly built house, and men – not young, because young people are all at the front – who were working there. It was as if there was a symbol in that gesture: building means hoping. A simple act, but very powerful.”
And then, there was the music. A classroom packed with students from the Kiev Conservatory, very young, between 17 and 18 years old, very attentive, hungry for art, for sound, for something else . "I started with the Ukrainian anthem, rearranged for a television broadcast, and I played it in a duo with the pianist Edoardo. They stood up. I will never forget that moment. It was as if they were all saying: we are here, and we are alive." A simple gesture, yet full of meaning. In that room, for a few minutes, music won over war.
Resilience, hope, resignation are the words used by Paolo Fresu to describe the faces and souls of people in Ukraine. And he uses them with moderation. "There are things that escape us, of course. Two days are not enough to understand such a complex reality. But something remains. Like that shelter, that mobile geography of danger, those faces, those hands. And that silence that precedes the music."
Tonight he will open the concert with the Ukrainian national anthem. "It's right this way," he says. Then, tomorrow, he will set off again towards Chişinău in Moldova and finally towards Italy. But what has happened in recent days - in the streets, in the shelters, in the classrooms - has left its mark.
"Bringing a language of peace like music here is a privilege. It means touching reality with your own hands, going beyond the images we see from afar. Being present. It's a small gesture, perhaps, but in certain contexts it can be worth a lot."
