Angelo Branduardi
Encyclopedia
Angelo Branduardi is an Italian
folk singer and composer who scored relevant success in Italy and European countries such as France
, Germany
, Belgium
and the Netherlands
.
, a small town in the province of Milan
, but early moved with the family to Genoa
. He was educated as a classical violin
ist in the local school of music. At the age of 18, he composed the music for the Confessioni di un malandrino (Hooligan's Confession) by Sergei Yesenin
.
He is married to Luisa Zappa, who wrote the lyrics for many of his songs. They have two daughters, Sarah and Maddalena, both musicians.
.
) and the fine, delicate song giving the LP its name, was a prelude to the success of the following works. Alla fiera dell'Est (English edition: Highdown Fair, 1976) was Branduardi's first vastly popular album, followed by La Pulce d'Acqua (English version, Fables and Fantasies 1978) and Cogli la prima mela (English edition, Life is the Only Teacher, 1979). Lyrics for the English versions of Branduardi's albums were written by Peter Sinfield
, also lyricist for King Crimson
and Emerson, Lake & Palmer
.
In those albums, Branduardi exploited themes and patterns from ancient music, mostly Renaissance
and early Baroque
. The very song "Alla fiera dell'Est" ("At the Eastern Fair") is still popular among Italians of every age, who test themselves to send in memory all the fable-like, repetition-based lyrics. It is based on an old Jewish song in Aramaic ("Chad Gadya" - One Kid Goat
) sung at the end of the Passover Seder
night service. In 2007 "Alla fiera dell'Est" was covered by Israeli singer Shlomi Shabat
for a Passover time commercial for cellphone company Pelephone
.
Lyrics had a broad spectrum of inspiration: a Danse macabre
, the theme of Satan's mistress, Chinese
, Native American
and Druidic tradition, the apocryphal Gospels
. Concertation owes much to the talents of Maurizio Fabrizio, and exploits unusual instruments for pop music: dulcimer
, Pan flute, lute
, clarinet
, among others - mixed with more standard guitar-bass-and-drums.
s (starts with a String Quartet
), Branduardi canta Yeats ("Branduardi sings Yeats", 1985) was a tribute to William Butler Yeats
. Pane e rose ("Bread and Roses", 1988) was a still inspired, but increasingly dark picture of life and death. Il Ladro ("The Thief", 1991) marked a very delicate point of Branduardi's life, edging on depression, echoed in a dark, almost cemeterial, style of singing.
The album Si può fare ("It Can Be Done", 1993) brought back Branduardi to normality, but the artist is now struggling to evade the minstrel
character which was now too tight for him. In 1994, he published Domenica e lunedì ("Sunday and Monday"), dedicated to the Italian poet Franco Fortini
.
after the catastrophic 1976 earthquake, he recorded the album Futuro antico ("Ancient Future"), in which he, as an early Baroque
musician, keeps reusing, mixing, wording pre-existing material along with his own. This experience, accomplished with the aid of musicians and musicologists, continued with Futuro antico II and Futuro antico III. The same year he performed "Te vojo 'bbene assaje" ("I love you so much" in Neapolitan
) with Italian pop singer Eugenio Finardi
.
In 1998, Branduardi teamed up with Italian stand-up comedian and writer Giorgio Faletti
for Il dito e la luna ("The Finger and the Moon").
He subsequently reworked earlier musical themes with writings of and about St. Francis
to produce L'infinitamente piccolo ("The Infinitely Small"); he wrote a musical on the same topic (Francesco).
In 2003, a new album, Altro ed altrove ("Other and Elsewhere"), in a time period marked by a rise of racism and intolerance, brought together (mainly) love stories from several cultures.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
folk singer and composer who scored relevant success in Italy and European countries such as France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
and the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
.
Biography
Branduardi was born in CuggionoCuggiono
Cuggiono is a small Italian town and comune in the province of Milan, 50 km west of Milan on the Motorway A4 to Turin, gate of Marcallo-Mesero.The Italian singer and composer Angelo Branduardi was born there....
, a small town in the province of Milan
Province of Milan
The Province of Milan : /) is a province in the Lombardy region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Milan. The provincial territory is highly urbanized, resulting in the third highest population density among the Italian provinces with more than 2,000 inhabitants/km2, just behind the provinces of...
, but early moved with the family to Genoa
Genoa
Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....
. He was educated as a classical violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
ist in the local school of music. At the age of 18, he composed the music for the Confessioni di un malandrino (Hooligan's Confession) by Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Yesenin
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...
.
He is married to Luisa Zappa, who wrote the lyrics for many of his songs. They have two daughters, Sarah and Maddalena, both musicians.
The beginnings
Branduardi's first album was never released, and resulted from a co-operation with Maurizio Fabrizio, composer and gifted performer. The first released album, Angelo Branduardi '74 was arranged with Paul BuckmasterPaul Buckmaster
Paul John Buckmaster is a Grammy Award-winning English artist, arranger and composer.He began learning the cello at the age of 4 and graduated from the Royal College of Music at age 16....
.
The minstrel
La Luna ("The Moon"), including "Hooligan's Confession" (translation of a poem by EseninSergei Yesenin
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...
) and the fine, delicate song giving the LP its name, was a prelude to the success of the following works. Alla fiera dell'Est (English edition: Highdown Fair, 1976) was Branduardi's first vastly popular album, followed by La Pulce d'Acqua (English version, Fables and Fantasies 1978) and Cogli la prima mela (English edition, Life is the Only Teacher, 1979). Lyrics for the English versions of Branduardi's albums were written by Peter Sinfield
Peter Sinfield
Peter John Sinfield is an English poet, lyricist and artist, most famously known as the lyricist and co-founding member of early incarnations of King Crimson, whose debut album In the Court of the Crimson King has been regarded as one of the most influential progressive rock albums ever...
, also lyricist for King Crimson
King Crimson
King Crimson are a rock band founded in London, England in 1969. Often categorised as a foundational progressive rock group, the band have incorporated diverse influences and instrumentation during their history...
and Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, also known as ELP, are an English progressive rock supergroup. They found success in the 1970s and sold over forty million albums and headlined large stadium concerts. The band consists of Keith Emerson , Greg Lake and Carl Palmer...
.
In those albums, Branduardi exploited themes and patterns from ancient music, mostly Renaissance
Renaissance music
Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...
and early Baroque
Baroque music
Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...
. The very song "Alla fiera dell'Est" ("At the Eastern Fair") is still popular among Italians of every age, who test themselves to send in memory all the fable-like, repetition-based lyrics. It is based on an old Jewish song in Aramaic ("Chad Gadya" - One Kid Goat
Chad Gadya
Chad Gadya is a playful cumulative song in Aramaic and Hebrew. It is sung at the end of the Passover Seder, the Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover...
) sung at the end of the Passover Seder
Passover Seder
The Passover Seder is a Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is conducted on the evenings of the 14th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, and on the 15th by traditionally observant Jews living outside Israel. This corresponds to late March or April in...
night service. In 2007 "Alla fiera dell'Est" was covered by Israeli singer Shlomi Shabat
Shlomi Shabat
Shlomi Shabat is a popular Israeli singer, musician, and artist who sings in the oriental Mizrahi style. He comes from a sephardic family that immigrated from Turkey, and sings in Hebrew, Turkish, and Spanish.-Musical career:...
for a Passover time commercial for cellphone company Pelephone
Pelephone
Pelephone is an Israeli-based telecommunications company, founded in 1986 as a joint venture between Motorola and Tadiran, today owned by Bezeq. It was the first company to offer mobile phone services in Israel. Due to this, the brand-name "Pelephone" became the genericized trademark for mobile...
.
Lyrics had a broad spectrum of inspiration: a Danse macabre
Danse Macabre
Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre , Danza de la Muerte , Dansa de la Mort , Danza Macabra , Dança da Morte , Totentanz , Dodendans , is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's...
, the theme of Satan's mistress, Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
and Druidic tradition, the apocryphal Gospels
New Testament apocrypha
The New Testament apocrypha are a number of writings by early Christians that claim to be accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. These writings often have links with books regarded as "canonical"...
. Concertation owes much to the talents of Maurizio Fabrizio, and exploits unusual instruments for pop music: dulcimer
Hammered dulcimer
The hammered dulcimer is a stringed musical instrument with the strings stretched over a trapezoidal sounding board. Typically, the hammered dulcimer is set on a stand, at an angle, before the musician, who holds small mallet hammers in each hand to strike the strings...
, Pan flute, lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
, clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
, among others - mixed with more standard guitar-bass-and-drums.
Experimentation and crisis
Subsequent albums showed an increasing desire towards experimentation and differentiation. Branduardi (1981) had a more intimate tone, Cercando l'oro ("Searching for Gold", 1983) had very sophisticated and delicate arrangementArrangement
The American Federation of Musicians defines arranging as "the art of preparing and adapting an already written composition for presentation in other than its original form. An arrangement may include reharmonization, paraphrasing, and/or development of a composition, so that it fully represents...
s (starts with a String Quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
), Branduardi canta Yeats ("Branduardi sings Yeats", 1985) was a tribute to William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
. Pane e rose ("Bread and Roses", 1988) was a still inspired, but increasingly dark picture of life and death. Il Ladro ("The Thief", 1991) marked a very delicate point of Branduardi's life, edging on depression, echoed in a dark, almost cemeterial, style of singing.
The album Si può fare ("It Can Be Done", 1993) brought back Branduardi to normality, but the artist is now struggling to evade the minstrel
Minstrel
A minstrel was a medieval European bard who performed songs whose lyrics told stories of distant places or of existing or imaginary historical events. Although minstrels created their own tales, often they would memorize and embellish the works of others. Frequently they were retained by royalty...
character which was now too tight for him. In 1994, he published Domenica e lunedì ("Sunday and Monday"), dedicated to the Italian poet Franco Fortini
Franco Fortini
Franco Fortini was the pseudonym of Franco Lattes, , an Italian poet, writer, translator, essayist, literary critic and Marxist intellectual.- Life :...
.
New directions
In 1996, during the celebrations for the restoration of the Duomo of SpilimbergoSpilimbergo
Spilimbergo is a town, with a population of 11,635, located northeast of Venice in the province of Pordenone in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, northern Italy...
after the catastrophic 1976 earthquake, he recorded the album Futuro antico ("Ancient Future"), in which he, as an early Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
musician, keeps reusing, mixing, wording pre-existing material along with his own. This experience, accomplished with the aid of musicians and musicologists, continued with Futuro antico II and Futuro antico III. The same year he performed "Te vojo 'bbene assaje" ("I love you so much" in Neapolitan
Neapolitan language
Neapolitan is the language of the city and region of Naples , and Campania. On October 14, 2008 a law by the Region of Campania stated that the Neapolitan language had to be protected....
) with Italian pop singer Eugenio Finardi
Eugenio Finardi
Eugenio Finardi is an Italian singer, songwriter, guitarist and keyboardist.-Life:Eugenio Finardi was born in Milan, Italy, on July 16, 1952, in a musical family: his father was an Italian music sound engineer and his mother an American opera singer; at age six Finardi made his first record,...
.
In 1998, Branduardi teamed up with Italian stand-up comedian and writer Giorgio Faletti
Giorgio Faletti
Giorgio Faletti is an Italian writer, actor and singer-songwriter. Born in Asti, Piedmont, he currently resides in Elba Island....
for Il dito e la luna ("The Finger and the Moon").
He subsequently reworked earlier musical themes with writings of and about St. Francis
Francis of Assisi
Saint Francis of Assisi was an Italian Catholic friar and preacher. He founded the men's Franciscan Order, the women’s Order of St. Clare, and the lay Third Order of Saint Francis. St...
to produce L'infinitamente piccolo ("The Infinitely Small"); he wrote a musical on the same topic (Francesco).
In 2003, a new album, Altro ed altrove ("Other and Elsewhere"), in a time period marked by a rise of racism and intolerance, brought together (mainly) love stories from several cultures.
Discography
- Angelo Branduardi (1974)
- La lunaLa Luna (album)La Luna is a concept album recorded by English soprano Sarah Brightman in 2000. It was released under license by Nemo Studios to Angel Records. The album combines pieces written by classical and modern composers....
(1975 - French edition: Confession d'un malandrin, 1981) - Alla fiera dell'estAlla fiera dell'estAlla fiera dell'est is an album by the Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. It was released in 1976 by Polydor and won the prize of Italian music critics in the same year...
(1976, Italian Music Critics's Award - French edition: A la foire de l'est - English edition: Highdown Fair, 1978) - La pulce d'acquaLa pulce d'acquaLa pulce d'acqua is an album of the Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. It was released in 1977 by Polydor. A French edition, entitled La demoiselle, was published in 1979; and English edition, entitled Fables and Fantasies and with lyrics written by Peter Sinfield, was released in...
(1977 - English edition: Fables and fantasies, 1980) - Cogli la prima melaCogli la prima melaCogli la prima mela is an album of the Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. It was released in 1979 by Polydor.The title track is a re-elaboration of a medieval Hungarian melody, entitled "U naseho Barty"...
(1979 - French Edition: La demoiselle) - (1980 - French Edition: va ou le vent te mene avec Maurizio Fabrizio)
- Gulliver,la luna e altri disegni (1980)
- Branduardi '81 (1981)
- Cercando l'oroCercando l'oroCercando l'oro is an album of the Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. It was released in 1983 by Polydor; in the same year a French version was also released, entitled Tout l'or du monde....
(1983 - French edition: Tout l'or du monde) - State buoni se potete (1983, soundtrack for the movie with the same name)
- Branduardi canta Yeats (1986)
- Pane e rose (1988 - French edition: Du pain et des roses)
- Il ladro (1990)
- Musiche da film (1992)
- Si può fareSi può fareSi può fare is an album by the Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi. It was released in 1992 by EMI Italiana.-Track listing:*"Si può fare"*"Il viaggiatore"*"Noi, come fiumi"*"Casanova"*"Forte"*"Indiani"*"Cambia il vento, cambia il tempo"...
(1992 - French edition: Ça se fait) - Domenica e lunedì (1994 - French edition: La menace, 1995)
- Camminando camminando (1996, live collection)
- Futuro antico I (1996)
- Il dito e la luna (1998, lyrics by Giorgio FalettiGiorgio FalettiGiorgio Faletti is an Italian writer, actor and singer-songwriter. Born in Asti, Piedmont, he currently resides in Elba Island....
) - Studio Collection (1998, collection)
- Futuro antico II (1999)
- L'infinitamente piccolo (2000)
- Futuro antico III (2002)
- Altro ed altrove (2003)
- The Platinum Collection (2005, collection)
- Futuro antico IV (2007)
- Senza Spina (2009)