Glossa always follows “microphone in hand” where creative musical ideas are developing, especially in early music, and over the label’s two decades this has often meant turning its attention to the length and breadth that is Italy: think Fabio Bonizzoni in music from Rome, the coverage of the madrigalian repertory from La Venexiana and La Compagnia del Madrigale, the subtle violin mastery of Enrico Gatti, the dazzling vocal virtuosity of Roberta Invernizzi (and not forgetting Paolo Pandolfo’s unique style). In recent years, Antonio Florio and I Turchini have also found a home at the label with their command of Neapolitan repertory.
Now, two multi-faceted artists (both of whom have worked with Florio) have joined forces to produce Siciliane: the songs of an island, a journey into the traditional songs of Sicily, using collections brought together by Giacomo Meyerbeer as the basis. The singer is that powerhouse of mood, both vocal and theatrical, Pino De Vittorio (who hails from Puglia), graced with a talent to bring into the present voices from the past across the regions of Italy, whilst the accompaniment is led by Franco Pavan, theorbo and baroque guitar player, director of Laboratorio ’600, music scholar and performer in many fine recordings over the years.
Pavan has assembled a selection of traditional songs for De Vittorio to perform, to evoke the spirit of the island of Sicily over the centuries, to try and capture its indefinable character through its people and their concerns. The result is likewise gloriously indefinable. We spoke to both Pavan and De Vittorio to reflect on this stimulating recording project.
What picture of Sicily does Siciliane aim to present?
Franco Pavan: One day an old Sicilian man said to me that the land also cries there. However, as we know, we can cry out of desperation, out of melancholy, or for joy at the same time. I think that Sicily is one of the places in the world where complexity is resolved in beauty: beauty in the landscape, in the arts, in the deepest of cultural expressions. With our recording we have tried to give a picture of this amazing island, starting from a tear to touch the incredible landscape of this island, remembering at the same time that no island is an island.
Is this a well-documented repertory – or one scattered far and wide? What has been required to make a representative selection of it for this recording?
FP: I worked on this repertory over more than three years in order to create the final programme for the recording. Just to give you an idea, we can find tens of thousands of poems written in the Sicilian language in the 17th and 18th centuries. For the music we have fewer sources, but at the same time those that we know of are very rich. I decided to start from the published or manuscript sources, and then to work on the transcriptions made by great musicians like Giacomo Meyerbeer, at the beginning of the 19th century or by Sicilian scholars such as Giuseppe Pitrè or Alberto Favara. In some cases we turned directly to the oral tradition. So, the body of material on which we have worked is of a great complexity, and we hope that we have been able to provide the listener with a simple, clear – and, of course, enjoyable – sound image from all this complexity.
What were you looking for from a singer of these songs, and how and why did Pino De Vittorio fit in here?
FP: I met Pino many years ago when we were both working on the spectacular Neapolitan repertory played by Antonio Florio’s Cappella de’ Turchini. We worked together for ten years, after which we performed together on another very important project with Accordone (Guido Morini and Marco Beasley).
He is like a “singing tree” (in the way that Béla Bartók used it to describe a traditional singer from Romania: one who was very well settled in his roots, but at the same time his branches collected the songs going toward the sky, i.e. the future. At the same time the tree is the true image of a very rooted “traditional culture”). Pino is also a singer able to connect written and unwritten music traditions. This is a very important aspect for me in this project, together with the passion, the elegance and the great knowledge that Pino shows for the music from the southern part of Italy.
Turning to Pino De Vittorio himself, for you, with what kind of clarity do these songs represent the spirit of Sicily?
Pino De Vittorio: These songs reflect very well the harsh and melancholy spirit of this land. The melodic language is rich of dramatic and expressive accents. Within it, we can listen to the cries of the sellers, the melodious chants of the peasants and the carters, the lullabies and the ritual chants for Holy Friday. These are songs that unite fancy with passion, poetry with music and bring us, with their tonal procedures from across the ages, from the past into the present.
How does story-telling in song from Sicily differ from what you have found in other regions?
PDV: In these songs from Sicily there are many similar aspects to other traditional corpus from the south of Italy. I dedicated many years of my life to studying the musical tradition of Puglia, and with that tradition I find many affinities here: melancholy, nobility, passion, elegance. These stories tell us about the working classes, the peasants and fishermen, desperate lovers, mothers singing the sweetest lullabies to their sons, brethren that during the feast for the saints sing ancient sacred melodies. Another aspect that the music from Sicily shares with the other lands of the south of Italy is the Arabic and Greek influence.
A further important aspect lies is the language. In Sicily there are many differences in the language between one village and another and for help with this I called on a dear friend from Modica. The language of these songs is early and different from the one in use today; in fact in these songs that language is much “sweeter” than today’s, much more “close”, I would say. I tried to be very near to the sound of the early language, and at the same time to be clear and comprehensible for the listeners of today.
What ranges of emotions and characters did this selection of songs call upon the performer to incarnate?
PDV: In these selection of songs that I did with Franco, I tried to choose the ones that permitted me to express my theatrical and vocal characteristics. These, as I mentioned before, cover a range of emotions: melancholy, but also irony, passion, nobility, the moving character of the sacred music but at the same time the funny rhythm found in the Tarantella. I tried to think that this music had been with me from a long time previous, and immediately the songs took shape in me.
This is music that pushes me to sing it in a natural way and I am at home when I sing it. These songs moved me very much when Franco gave me the possibility to listen to them. It was a wonderful discovery, both for the music and for the soul of the Sicilian people which is inside it. We really hope to be able to move also you all!!!
For Franco Pavan as the musical director of this project, what is the dividing line between written-down music and the spirit of improvisation?
FP: This dividing line lives and lies always for us in the knowledge of the music. Each repertory demands its own dignity and style. For Laboratorio ’600 the most important thing is to study the basso continuo practice starting with the treatises, the styles and the music written by the great composers. After thirty years of practice I am still a long way away from being able to use all the treasures we have received from such composers. I think that we need to continue rediscovering this legacy to learn in which way to improvise with freedom and at the same time with respect. This is true, I think, also for traditional music.
How do the instrumental pieces on the recording add to the musical picture of Sicily which you are presenting?
FP: We like to think that in music to move is much more interesting than to surprise, and this is the direction that we decided to follow also with the instrumental music. We worked on the sound, and on very ‘simple’ solutions. We decided to rely on the beautiful collection transcribed by Meyerbeer during his trip to Sicily at the beginning of the 19th century reflecting music that in most cases originated in the 17th century. Capona and Li cinque passi are two examples here. Of course we used also music taken from the collections of Pitrè and Favara, but always with the same reasoning behind their choices.
The use of plucked instruments gave us the possibility to be very expressive, we hope, in the performance of the very peculiar harmonies and modal system of this beautiful music. We worked toward simplicity, but always remembering that God is in the particular. We have also to thank Rino Trasi for the outstanding work he did on the sound, we were very lucky to have such a clever and passionate man working with us.
We hope that this first experiment on this repertory will be followed by others very soon: this music is so beautiful that we will be forever enchanted by it.
MARK WIGGINS© 2013 Note 1 Music / Glossa Music photographs © Rino Trasi