October 9, Monday, 6 pm
Lėlė Puppet Theatre, Arklių g. 5
Canti ed Incanti
Traditional Italian songs and tarantellas
Marco Beasley and ACCORDONE Italy
- Marco Beasley voice
- Stefano Rocco lute, guitar
- Fabio Accurso lute
- Franco Pavan chitarrone, colascione
- Mauro Durante frame drums
The message, handed down orally from father to son, of a world that is slowly but inevitably disappearing under the assaults of modernity. Leaving aside for once the music of churches and palaces, Accordone here present the most authentic and secret folk tradition of Southern Italy: song and sound become magic and medicine.
Marco Beasley and Guido Morini founded Accordone in 1984, motivated
by a passionate interest in both the musicological approach to performance
problems and Italian vocal music from the Renaissance to the early 18th
century. Lo Tasso Napolitano (1991) was the first project to bear a clear
dramatic imprint: from that moment on, the concert as an event articulated
by both music and drama became the group’s stylistic trademark.
With Vox clamans in solitudine (1995), the juxtaposition of texts and
music from diverse places, periods and traditions met with great success,
while two years later Il Salotto Napoletano was released, an intimate
foray into the world of the classical Neapolitan canzone of the 19th
century. There followed Il sogno d’Orfeo (1999), a veritable chamber
opera, and Via Toledo (2001), a concert of music from the oral tradition
of southern Italy.
The requirements of a performance more in keeping with the canons of
the 17th century prompted Beasley and Morini to propose a kind of dramatised
concert that brought out the theatrical aspect and transformed the singer
into a character. Just like the earliest music chapels, Accordone creates
a new repertory for its own concert activity. From this was born, in
2001, Una Odissea, an opera composed by Morini to texts by Beasley.
In 2003, their first studio recording, La Bella Noeva, was released.
This was followed one year later by Vivifice Spiritus Vitae Vis, a sacred
composition by Guido Morini on Latin texts from the Old Testament. 2004
was marked by Frottole, a project concerning the great musical tradition
of the late Renaissance in Italy, to which their first planned recording
for Cypres was dedicated.
Marco Beasley, the son of an English
father and a Neapolitan mother, was born in 1957 and grew up in Naples, the most
musical of Italian cities. His passion for singing then led him to move to Bologna,
where he attended courses in the performing arts at the University, concentrating
especially on the vocal music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. At the same
time he carried on his studies in 15th- and 16th-century musical literature,
with particular focus on two stylistic pillars of that period: recitar
cantando and sacred and secular polyphony.
The meeting with Cathy Berberian – of vital importance to him – also
dates back to those same years. An unforgettable champion of contemporary
culture, she was his teacher for, unfortunately, too short a period.
Berberian’s premature death acted as a catalyst: Beasley found
himself with a store of eclectic musical experiences which have shaped
his unique artistic personality. It is difficult to say what prevails
in his performances: the magic of his beautiful voice, his ability to
communicate or his extraordinary stage presence.
Together with Stefano Rocco and Guido Morini, he founded Accordone, the
group that has enabled him to develop his artistic personality to the
full and which has become the centre of his activity as well as the natural
framework in which to develop new ideas. Since 2001 Marco Beasley has
written all the texts for Accordone’s new works.