A Giuni Russo album that shouldn’t go unnoticed

Twenty years ago, at the age of 53, he left us Giuni Russo. During his 35-year career, Giuni Russo he managed to package several successes: “A summer at the seaside”, “Alghero” And “Mediterranean” are the first titles that come to mind. But at a certain point, the Sicilian musician decided to move away from the charts and release more experimental records: she went from a hit like “Alghero” to classical music and from classical music to World music, ending up in the territories of sacred music.

The “post-Alghero” records didn’t have the same success as the more pop ones released in the mid-80s: however, when today we think of .Giuni Russoshe is remembered (unfairly) only as the singer of “A summer at the seaside”We want to remember her by publishing our review of her 2002 live album “Miss Romeo Live”.

A voice like Giuni Russo’s should be considered a heritage to be protected and preserved. And since there are no other voices like Giuni Russo’s in the world of Italian music, Italian music should be proud to be able to boast and valorize an artistic heritage like Giuni Russo’s voice. For many years, this has not (unfortunately) happened, because the Italian record industry has almost forgotten about Giuni Russo’s existence; who has nevertheless stubbornly, tenaciously, proudly continued to offer the gift of her voice to those who wanted to listen to her live. Giuni Russo’s return to the recording scene with this album – and for a prestigious label like Sony – seems to me to be an important and significant fact, as well as a legitimate and deserved satisfaction for the artist and the opportunity to re-propose to the general public an interpreter without equals and a collection of songs that highlight her versatility and intensity.

The title of the album, “Signorina Romeo”, refers – as those in the know will not fail to notice – to the real name of Giuni Russo, Giusy Romeo: the name with which the Sicilian singer made her debut by winning the Castrocaro Festival in 1967 (she sang “A chi”).

The purely “light” beginnings were followed, several years later, in 1975, by a first – today very rare, and much sought after by collectors – album for BASF entitled “Love is a woman”; in 1981, a sensational “second debut” with a very refined album entitled “Energie” – still today, inexplicably and guiltily, not available on compact disc – and then the great popular success with “Un’estate al mare”, which made the stage name Giuni Russo familiar to the Italian public. But this is not the place to reconstruct in detail the professional itinerary of an artist who, in recent years, has pushed her musical and spiritual research even further, to the point of dedicating herself to a repertoire with a strong mystical imprint and exploring the traditional singing methods of worlds far from our own.

“Signorina Romeo” is, in some ways, a compendium – recorded live, and not corrected for the inevitable imperfections of “live” recordings so as not to alter the authenticity of the document – of the artistic expressions that today, for Giuni, remain exemplary and fundamental for her education; for this reason you will not find some of her explicitly “pop” pages that – although they allowed her great commercial satisfaction – were never really congenial to her.
Almost symbolically, the album opens with a duet with Franco Battiato, the fellow countryman musician with whom Giuni has shared important moments of her artistic career.

Recorded in Catania in 1996, “J’entends siffler le train” is the song – a hit by Richard Anthony, later covered by Battiato in “Fleur(s) – that Giuni and Franco sang together on that occasion: Michele Fedrigotti’s piano introduces the two voices that then share the melodic development of the song, whose melancholic retro elegance is magically underlined by the contrast between the vocal timbres of the performers.

Here follows one of the courageous and original “songs” that Giuni Russo and her co-author (and producer) Maria Antonietta Sisini have developed drawing inspiration from sacred and religious texts: “La sua figura” quotes the poetic works of San Giovanni Della Croce (whose writings date back to the sixteenth century) and when Giuni’s voice intones “Sai che la dolore d’amore non si cura se non con la presenza della sua figura” a mystical impetus seems to pervade those who listen to it, accompanied by a penetrating melody.

“Un’anima tra le mani” is an original reinterpretation of “Un’anima pura”: an unexpected rediscovery, for a song full of references. It was in fact with this piece from the repertoire of Don Marino Barreto Jr. that a young Mina Mazzini made her public debut, singing – almost for fun – at the Bussola in Viareggio, in 1958; and it was with this song that the Rokes participated (without great success, to be honest), in 1964, at the Festival degli Sconosciuti in Ariccia. Giuni Russo’s version is calm and thoughtful, almost dispassionate, linear and composed, and reveals the clear beauty of the melodic line of the piece.

“Il carmelo di Echt” is a composition that Juri Camisasca wrote, and included in his eponymous album, inspired by the life and death of Edith Stein: a German Jew, a Carmelite nun with the name of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she was sent to the Carmel of Echt, in Holland, to save her from Nazi persecution; but from there she was deported to Auschwitz, where she died (she was recently proclaimed blessed). The song is pervaded by an unreal serenity but also marked by a strong drama, as is Giuni Russo’s interpretation, which draws accents of profound compassion from it.

The genesis of “Sakura” is curious: Giuni heard it hummed by a Japanese hostess in 1969, and immediately memorized the melody, then committed herself to researching the score and learning the text and its pronunciation. It is a traditional song (“Sotto il ciliegio”) intended as a hymn to creation that is renewed in the time of spring, and the dry musical accompaniment highlights the almost disembodied purity of the interpreter’s voice.
Dark piano notes introduce “Ciao amore (ciao)”: it is the song with which Luigi Tenco in 1967 said goodbye to the world of Italian pop music, a world that had not been able to understand and appreciate him.

Singing the refrain, Giuni subtly changes the melody, while the sound atmosphere effectively underlines the true meaning of the text, that of detachment from one’s land and one’s affections, that of the disorientation of those who “jump a hundred years in a single day, from the carts in the fields to the planes in the sky”: and the male choir takes on the cadences of a funeral song.

Inspired by a trip to Jerusalem, “La sposa” – perhaps the most “experimental” moment of this album – is the celebration of a change of interior life and the achievement of a new fulfillment through the search for God; mystical resonances also echo in “Vieni” (whose lyrics take up the verses of Jalal-Dim Rumi, Persian mystic), and in the long and electronic “Io nulla”, signed like the two previous compositions by Maria Antonietta Sisini and Giuni Russo. The different and different sound atmospheres of these three moments – which constitute the central part of the album – highlight the versatile creativity of the musicians who accompany the solo voice: Stefano Medioli (piano, keyboards and computer programming), Marco Remondini (classical and electronic cello, soprano sax) and Corrado Medioli (voice and accordion).

We return to the song form with one of the most esoteric pieces composed by Franco Battiato: that “Il Re del Mondo” which was included in the tracklist of “L’era del Cinghiale Bianco” (1979) and which Giuni, having included it in her concert repertoire for some time, remodels to her own measure – although it is written in a key that is not hers – making an evocative and nostalgic text her own and chanting it over a light piano texture. Also for “Nomadi” (another piece by Camisasca, already taken up by Alice and Battiato, but originally conceived and written specifically for Giuni) Russo chooses a piano accompaniment, this time pressing and percussive, concert-like, with which the voice fights a battle of contrasts.

The emotion is palpable when Giuni intones “Nada te turbe”, a poetic text by Saint Teresa of Avila to which the interpreter gives a – pardon the oxymoron – sensual spirituality enhanced by the rarefied sound texture of the accompaniment; similarly in “O vos omnes” it is the voice alone and overbearing protagonist, free to give maximum importance to the words of a biblical quatrain taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

The album closes with “Adeste fideles”, a traditional Christmas carol of the Catholic Church.

If I may claim to be the one who suggested to Giuni Russo that she record it for the first time: it happened in 1983, while I was planning “Natale con i tuoi.”, the first album of Christmas songs specially composed by Italian singers. I still remember the long shiver that ran through me when Alberto Radius made me listen to a tape (other times.) with the first mix of the song performed by Giuni Russo; the same shiver that I feel now listening to this live version, in which Giuni’s voice rises as if it were in tune under the vaults of a Gothic cathedral. This “Signorina Romeo” is not an album like many others (too many, in fact) that come out every week and risk getting lost on the shelves of some store. This is an album that means a lot to Giuni Russo, and it is (I believe, and I truly believe it) an album that should not go unnoticed.