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Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Sicily: That stands for mamma, mafia, murder and … milk. Milk? Exactly, while Sicily is connected with milk in a much longer history than with the notorious “m”- cliché.
According to legend, the inhabitants of the Sicilian town of Sperlinga felt a great affinity towards their French conquerors. This affinity went so far, that they afforded the besieged French protection in their castle during the Vesper war (1282). As the attackers wanted to know if the hated French were hidden in the castle, the castle`s inhabitants threw small balls of cheese out of the arrow slits – and delivered the “proof” that harmless shepherds lived within the walls.
However, the cheese wasn`t made from the milk of sheep, rather from the milk of the French women… The history of Sperlinga is just one of many Sicilian legends from which Etta Scollo´s new fascinating program is composed. After the huge success of Canta Rò “Hommage to Rosa Balistreri”, she now sings about Rosalia, Palermo`s popular patron saint, who was a blond Norman.
And about Colapesce, a boy who was half fish and half man and carried the island on the sea bed, so that it wouldn`t sink, while his beloved waited for him eternally… Authors such as Jules Verne and Patrick Brydone have made Silicy`s legends famous. Indeed, Friedrich Schiller recounts thereof in his ballad “The diver”. In Etta Scollos program these are aroused newly to life: “Les Siciliens!” is a musical bazaar full of unheard sounds and unspoken words, which live on in the fantasy of the public. Johann Wolfgang Goethe already knew: “Sicily is the gate to Europe…here is the key to all.” Etta Scollo shows us with her program, that in each of us, Signore e Signori, lies a Sicilian.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
CANTA RO’ (Untertitel: Rosa, die letzte Sängerin Siziliens) wurde im Hof der Regionalbibliothek in Palermo uraufgeführt, dann im Hof des Erzbischofs in Cefalù sowie in der Gartenanlage der dreihundert Jahre alten Villa Spedalotto in Bagheria wiederholt. Dirigiert hat der angesehene Maestro Angelo Faja. Das Album erschien 2005.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
One morning a heart wakes up, getting aware that his body that used to cuddle, protect and sustain him, is no more. So he decides to go and search for him. This is how this odd bodyless heart’s travel starts.
At first he goes back to his past, to his childhood dwellings, he sees again his father shaving and singing about a capricious woman, The curly woman of Domenico Modugno. He resumes his travel and here he is, during a summer in the sixties, in his house yard, from a balcony echo the notes of Mina’s new hit If over the phone, so extroverted and shocking for those years. On his way, he obviously comes across the first guitar arrangements he was able to play with the moving De Andrè‘s Lost love song and the ironical Over the window’s panes of Jannacci at the beginning of his career. He goes on and here he is again in those squares of the seventies where committed songs used to be performed, and he sings the dramatic love story of Gualtiero Bertelli’s Nina, do you remember. And the heart goes on, far away, to a smoky cabaret in Vien-na, he listens to an unusual woman song, breaking all the social rules, she claims her having no scruples in The Novak from Cissy Kraner. But he doesn’t stop there, he wants to understand where and why this body suddenly has gone. Heading North, he finds again the loving attention of The care that Franco Battiato would take about himself and other sick hearts, passionate, clear and efficient as a therapist. But the missing heart hasn’t finished his travel yet, why did this body leave him to beat alone as in The bachelor of Paolo Conte? He resumes his way, this missing heart, again and again, now looking at present times because maybe the answer is there, among the light and deep lines of the young poet Marthia Carrozzo or in the mocking and redundant Stefano Benni’s lyrics I Do Love You. Now the heart sits down, at a street corner, he collects all his clues and memories, as a treasure. They all beat together with his heart upon the concrete that amplifies it as a musical theme. Heart missing becomes a song and he knows that behind the corner, between past and future, his body-core, is waiting for him, brand new.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
The musical arrangements for IL FIORE SPLENDENTE (The Shining Flower) are by Etta Scollo, in collaboration with Peter Hinderthür, Ferdinand von Seebach and Jan-Peter Klöpfel.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Language and music, the poetic word and the composed sound: for Etta Scollo, the two have been making ever-new blossoming partnerships ever since she took up poems by her compatriot Rosa Balisteri in 2005 with "Canta Ro". Never before, however, has the Sicilian molded language in such a comprehensive way, from so many different sources, into a sonorous form as in her new work: on "Il passo interiore" she accompanies man on his inner journey - a journey with texts from half a millennium, which possess philosophical, spiritual and evermore humanistic traits.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Everything is traveling: the earth is revolving around its own axis, its land and water masses, the animals on it, the people. What moves is alive, and it leaves stories behind. Etta Scollo has long been fascinated by this mystery, that all life is in its own sort of cycle, but also seems to be interconnected.
She embarks on a journey with her new album as well, devoting herself to the eternal movement from a completely new perspective. "Il Viaggio Di Maria" focuses on traditional Christmas carols from their native home of Sicily, which include the flight of Mary of Nazareth, who is pregnant with the baby Jesus, to Bethlehem.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Actually, I hadn`t intended to produce a second Rosa Balistreri album. Especially not to a large extent with the same songs as the first and in such a reduced form, constantly searching for an equilibrium between the strings of a fiddle and blowing into a shell-trumpet. My audiences requested this CD of me, audiences as different as the places where we found a stage to perform our Rosa Balistreri concerts. A journey which began between the four walls of a practice room, where we played the songs differently again and again, searching with this or that instrument from the many that Frank Wulff and Hinrich Dageför were skilled with for the right sound until, for instance, we found the correct tone for the prelude to the last track “Quannu moru” in a simple glass of water. Not the demands, nor the challenge – only the play and the irony of coincidence which smuggles itself in secretly would become music. And perhaps that is why the word play in German and English is ambiguous and also refers to music. And perhaps in fact it is this “playing with the sound” which has created an indefinable distance between this recording and the symphonical form of the previous CD and to the sobriety and intimity which belongs to Rosa alone.
So, along with us playing and “playing”, travelling and working our audiences have grown from clubs to theatres up to open air concerts, always with the same wish: to be able to hear the concert again, on a live CD. I have consciously chosen recordings from two locations: the Courtyard of the Palazzo Di Lorenzo in Gibellina and the “Tipi” in Berlin: On these occasions my brother Sebastiano spontaneously added his valuable contribution with the Renaissance Lute (alongside of which we could both finally live out our longtime wish to play together) and that of my friend and trombonist Ferdinand von Seebach who also arranged a few songs for the previous “Canta Ro´!” production with the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana. Rosa performed in Gibellina after the place had been completely destroyed in 1968 by an earthquake. She remembered this later as one of the most intensive concerts of her career. The “Istituto di Alta Cultura della Fondazione Orestiadi” has now for many years here represented an emblematic location for the culture and art of Sicily, a location at which the rememberance of a dramatic history is becoming a driving force for the future. Large, multi-cultural Berlin on the other hand has become my “adoptive” city, and represents the present and the future for me, as well as for countless other citizens of the world.
These two poles of europe reflect my history; in the singing and telling of Rosa and the Sicily that I have experienced, I wish that Rosa will never again be forgotten – and Sicily no longer be an isolated island.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Etta Scollo has created with the album Lunaria a musical interpretation of the novel of the same name to commemorate the recently deceased famous Italian writer Vincenzo Consolo.
Between narrative literature and sung poetry, we see a fantastic Sicily colored by a kaleidoscope of Mediterranean and baroque tones. The story tells of a Sicilian king, a melancholy character who is the opposite of the power he has. The untypical monarch is dreaming one night from the falling of the moon. It just seems a nightmare to be, but is actually a prophecy: in a faraway village in the land of the king, which can be found on any map, the Moon is really fallen ...
The story itself is already a score: songs, dances, poetry, whose musical tension is highlighted by a special language full of different dialect forms.
In Milan, Etta Scollo met with her musicians in the rooms in which Vincenzo Consolo wrote the text of Lunaria and they played there the music of the CD. Here at the home of Vincenzo Consolo, where the everyday life of the writer was happening, his personal and literary encounters took place. Here the musicians found the right atmosphere and inspiration to give musical expression to the words:
The island on which a fragment of a word lives, here it returns in all its grace and hope in a dream in the luminous joy of deception.
On tiptoe Etta Scollo and her musicians have come at a moderate technical equipment over the threshold and have been able to absorb in this environment , what Consolo himself described in a confidential and sensitive moment as one of his most intimate and dearest to him texts within his literary oeuvre.
Etta Scollo
Singer / Songwriter
Format:
CD
Being in the Now: This is wisdom that spiritualists and philosophers have been teaching for millennia. But is the "now" worth striving for in these times of crisis and war? With her new opus "Ora", the Sicilian Etta Scollo provides a musically complex answer. She is not content with simple and easy phrases. Keeps the dramaturgical tension high by surprising with each new piece. And so, in her first homeland of Catania, she created an album with star producer Taketo Gohara that is poetically and politically touching - with more than a small glimmer of hope.