Gianluigi Trovesi, Gianni Coscia

La misteriosa musica della Regina Loana is a tribute to Umberto Eco (1932-2016) by clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia. Coscia and Eco went to school together in Alessandria and stayed friends for life, and Eco wrote liner notes for the duo's earlier ECM albums. The starting point is his partly autobiographical novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It is a meditation on memory, in which the narrator recovers his past through old sheet music, records and school papers.

This is the fourth ECM album by the duo, after In cerca di cibo, Round About Weill and Frère Jacques: Round About Offenbach. Trovesi plays piccolo and alto clarinets, Coscia the accordion. They recorded between November 2017 and January 2018 at the Night and Day Studio in Cascinagrossa, near Alessandria, and the album was mixed in Lugano by Stefano Amerio and Guido Gorna. "We have tried to run back through some of the book's countless musical cues," Coscia writes in his liner notes. The title was suggested by Eco's son Stefano Eco.

Nineteen mostly short tracks move between American standards, Italian popular songs and original pieces. The opening Interludio is a piece Coscia wrote at fourteen, more than seventy years earlier, which moved the thirteen-year-old Eco to write a poem. Three brief Nebjana pieces paraphrase Leoš Janáček's In the Mists, since fog runs through the novel. Eco and Umberto are improvised from Trovesi's gematria, a game of correspondences between letters and numbers, on his friend's name. Around them come Basin Street Blues, As Time Goes By, two takes of Moonlight Serenade and a medley of five songs from the EIAR radio era.

Writing in Musically Speaking, Mel Minter called the record "a delightful and inventive homage to the novel and its author." George W. Harris of Jazz Weekly heard "a cozy, folksy and intimate meeting that feels like a Sunday morning in the park with longtime friends." In Sounds and Books Sebastian Meißner noted how it joins elements of classical music, jazz, blues and Italian folk music.

CD edition, ECM 2652, released in June 2019, with Coscia's liner notes in Italian, English and German and drawings by Umberto Eco.