3- Estate

- Shirley Horn (1987)

 

Few songs are less summery than Bruno Martino's Estate; few versions as autumnal as the one sung by Shirley Horn.

On the piano, she builds Estate with pedals, repeated phrases, clusters of triads left to trail in the ether - and by immersing everything in a slow and dreamlike tempo that seems to be only her piano, even if far down the soundscape yes, you can also hear the drums and, all in all, there is also a double bass, somewhere. But her voice! It sounds coming and going like the waves of the sea.

 

The whole song has the atmosphere of a dish of de-constructed cuisine: you smell and taste (or hear) the different components as if they each of them belonged to its own world; yet - together - they give a total sense to these passing moments.

 

Renato Sellani would have called it "a funeral march" but for me Estate is quintessentially dream music, where the past and the future don't matter and you find yourself balanced between this feeling of love and sadness and an eternal fluctuating actuality, thanks to the fucking slow tempo of Shirley.

 

João Gilberto, who was the greatest interpreter of this song, would call it saudade. As saudade - as a feeling - is the basic ingredient of Brazilian mental cuisine, in Italy we tried to translate it - without success - with "distance" (from home), and Americans call it homesickness. And it fits perfectly to describe when love is no longer there, even if love is the only thing in which we should truly believe andwish to dream in life?

5- Symphony No. 3 - movement I, II, III (Symfonia piesni zalosnych)

- Henryk Górecki (1978)

 

Flying, at least once in our lives, is something that our unconscious (if it still exists and is not outlawed) commands us to try, at night. And for flying, nothing is more congenial than this symphony composed in two months: between October and December 1976.

Known as the "Symphony of Sad Songs", it is actually a dazzling declaration of the supremacy of music.

 

Three movements, each a slow one with a part for soprano that recites texts on the relationship between mother and son (or daughter) and the immanence of death.

 

The central movement, the best known and certainly the shortest and most immediate, in the singing takes up a phrase that Górecki found thanks to a photo (of a writing on a wall) in an old book: "Mamma non piangere. Regina del Cielo vergine candide, guardami sempre". It was left to posterity by an eighteen-year-old Polish girl, presumably Christian, captured by the Gestapo.

 

The other two movements take up religious texts (in the first movement, the "Lament of the Cross") and secular texts (a mother's lament for her dead son) that are reflected in a music inspired by the folk music of the Tatra Mountains, Górecki's native region.

Unexpectedly (coming from a composer dedicated to works of very different usability for most of his life) this symphony has become the best-selling classical music album by a living composer in history.

 

Listening to it, you understand why: deep down it releases an incandescent spirituality, melancholy and at the same time an unbridled joy of living. A carpe diem that tends towards super-human limits, as in the lament of the first movement, where the Virgin prays that her son's wounds be transferred to her, to feel cum passione and alleviate his suffering. Can you realize, leaving aside the Christian allegory, the sublime, brutally revolutionary beauty of con-passion? In a world where I read MSM and they teach me instead to not give a damn about others and to go my own way "without looking anyone in the eye"?

 

That this work is 'a flower born from the asphalt' can be understood by considering that Górecki lived almost always in Katowice, the Polish city known for its coal industry and steelworks - at the same time one of the most polluted areas in Europe, if not in the world: a place where those who grow vegetables in the garden do so at their own risk "knowing that they will die anyway".

 

Henryk, who always had health problems (six operations before the age of 26), lived between communism and capitalism choosing, between the two, Catholicism - which is a defensible choice, when you are between the frying pan and the fire. He became the first Polish composer to have composed for the Pope and the latter - the Polish Pope - when he heard the work of his compatriot ended up crying in his arms. How can you blame the infallible?

 

The "Symfonia piesni zalosnych" has been used by a dozen and a half directors, notably in that masterpiece that is "Tree of Life" (and also in "To the Wonder" to stay with Terrence Malick) as well as in Sorrentine's "La Grande Bellezza" and in films as diverse as "Basquiat", "Ripley's Game" and "Fearless".

 

This music is a pure aural translation of the concept of grace in Tree of Life: light and flying like the things that fly gracefully in the ether of Malick's film.

 

Modal textures begin this relatively simple Symphony No. 3 - a guttural weave of double basses that slowly unravels into a canon led by violins. Then, the three movements lead us - for almost an hour of dreamy music - to a mental plateau that ends on that seraphic major chord that restores hope to an infinite 'happy melancholy'.

 

At this point, the symphony has invaded our hearts - now finally we feel the vertigo of the sufferings of war and the Iron Curtain and the strength of the spirit and the power of compassion and how propaganda's sound bites offer us a shallow, uncompassionate vision of life, as soon as we make the mistake of listening to it, and how much love for others we can absorb, and propagate by return, in its stead. If we want it.