Occhi Turchini - Songs from Calabria

The Guardian 80

De Vittorio/Laboratorio 600/Pavan
(Glossa)

The singer and actor Pino De Vittorio has already made an album of the traditional songs of Sicily with Laboratorio 600, a collection curated by the ensemble’s director, the lute and theorbo player Franco Pavan, and here they turn their attention to music from the other side of the Straits of Messina. This sequence of vocal and instrumental pieces from Calabria consists mostly of traditional songs, some of them transcribed directly from field recordings, some included in manuscripts held in Naples and Munich.

All but one of the numbers is secular, though that single sacred piece, Si Partì la Madonna, describing a despairing Mary’s search for Christ during his scourging, is one of the most striking. There’s also a parody Te Deum, turned into a diatribe against the power of church and state in southern Italy in the 18th century, and which was originally set to music by Paisiello. That version has been lost, and as in other cases where the original music is missing, Pavan has found other sources that seem to fit the texts perfectly. Stanzas from a Calabrian-language version of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata describing the death of Clorinda are very effectively set to the melodic and harmonic templates of the 17th-century romanesca.