Search - Giovanna Marini :: Passioni

Four women sing, earthy and sophisticated

James K. Miller | Cleveland Heights, Ohio USA | 04/18/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Passioni is the latest of many CDs by Giovanni Marini, who since the mid 1970s has produced some of the most passionate and committed music I have ever heard -- almost always for four female voices singing without instruments. (Once in awhile Marini does do a little strum on the acoustic guitar -- after all she studied with the guitar great Segovia.)



If you were going to label this music, I guess you would put in the World Music category, except that Italian music almost never gets into that bin, but this is Italian music like you never heard before. Those of you who know Bernice Reagon's Sweet Honey in the Rock might think of Giovanna Marini as an Italian counterpart to Sweet Honey.



Giovanni Marini's music is rooted in the nasal, harsh, yet often soaring sounds of peasant Italian music, which was being revived in Italy at the same time as the folk revival in the United States. But she is also a cutting edge writer of music which speaks to contemporary realities in Italy and elsewhere in the world. She speaks of what she has been doing in the past decade or so as "cantatas" or as they used to call them in the seventies, "concept albums." Much of her work is quite political, although this CD is less so, at least on the surface.



Passioni, as the title might suggest, has a number of songs on it with their origins in the traditional religious music of the Italian countryside --as well a song to a text by the great Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, and a number of originals by Marini -- but Giovanna Marini, Patrizia Bovi, Francesca Breschi and Patrizia Nasini sing these songs with an intricate intensity which makes you put down whatever else you are doing.



If you buy this CD you will certainly be the first on your block because she seems to be little known outside of Italy and France, but that is our great loss.



I have 8 of her albums and this stands among the best of them.



One problem: the music is sung in Italian and there are no English (or other language) translations included. Nor will a check of her web site offer you the words in English. We can only hope that will come. However, four naked voices convey so much emotion that you have to feel you know what they are saying, even if the words are unfamiliar.



Jim Miller"