The songs of this fruitful artistic period are love songs – after all, at the time it would have been difficult and risky to say anything else – but they provoked a social revolution until then unpublished: never art, in any previous time, had left the intellectual circles and the educated salons to be acclaimed even by the people with such sincere transport. Not always the artists who created them were Neapolitans but AVVENNE A NAPOLI who designed a “culture of feeling” in which still identifies a high model of humanity, still today a desirable reference point.
Over time, I will listen many times to the rare recordings survived in scratched and dilapidated records: the magical interpretations of Gennaro Pasquariello, those masterful of Francesco Albanese, the most famous and passionate of Enrico Caruso … I will understand from them that beyond every technique, every talent, every vocal extension, the song is an expression of life that passes within; that “certain notes” are not to be found in the “throat” because they will never be there if we have not lived them and if our heart has not understood them. The extraordinary and planetary success of this repertoire with which the greatest singers in the world have measured themselves, should be exhaustive in giving it the right glory and yet it is not so! Even today, and even more so in the cultural confusion of our time, there remains a mixture of history and popular legend that confuses, offends, disfigures and plunders improperly these enlightened and enlightened artists. We owe to them the “song form” as it is still practiced in modern music; we owe to them the birth of “the interpreter” that evolves the operatic singing set by the schools of the time so that the singer designs and revives in the voice the emotions of the poet; we owe to them the poignant elegance of sentiments that is generated in the hearts of men when the melody of an exalted musician crosses the verses of a supreme poet: Fenesta vascia, Era de maggio, Luna nova, A vucchella, I’ te vurria vasà, Uocchie c’arraggiunate, Voce ‘e notte, Passione, Serenata napulitana, Silenzio cantatore, Maria Marì…
I am sitting in a pub in the province, one of the narrow ones, with little space and little air; it is not the best but, it must be said, it is one of those places where it is still possible to listen to good music. Julian Oliver Mazzariello is playing tonight. I love his Anglo-Italian piano, refined and brilliant; I like to hear it on stage while we play my music together but also go and listen to it when he plays his. During the concert, after a valuable and complex prelude, I recognize the melody of “Accarezzame” a Neapolitan song (text by Nisa, music by Pino Calvi) published in 1955.
He was not even born yet. It will be born in 1978 in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, a few kilometers from London, immersed in a culture a thousand miles away from ours. Ours will know her in late adolescence and falls in love with her, to the point that she decides to make her own, to move to Campania, where she still lives, in Cava De’ Tirreni. I am surprised by his performance: he sounds more of the world. His piano technique is original, international, but the emotion he spreads does not seem to come from his agile hands, it seems to come from other places: it’s Neapolitan!
… When I come home, I am still immersed in those atmospheres … I feel the emotions of those poets, of those musicians, of those performers who created them. I would like to sing them as they have heard them, careful only to sculpt the life that passes inside, naturally rebellious to any conventional mannerism. It’s my homage to the Masters who taught me the Art of Feeling: because emotions have a precise sound, they have precise words but, to recognize them, you have to learn them.
Eduardo De Crescenzo