Cristina Donà’s English album
Twenty years ago Cristina Dona released the album of the same name in English to open up to the international market. An album in which the Italian songs included in “Where are you” (read the review here) released in 2003. Here is the review of “Cristina Dona” written for us by Julius Nannini.
And who said that Italian music can’t be exported? Cristina Donà is trying with her new eponymous album and the encouragement of Davey Ray Moor of Cousteau, a well-tested collaboration. Cristina’s English album is actually a re-release of the latest “Dove sei tu”, from which a good part of the songs were taken, with the addition of an acoustic version of “How deep is your love” by the Bee Gees (which restores freshness and value to the original melody, too glossy in the performance of the Gibb brothers) and of “Goccia”, left in Italian (as it had been accepted by BBC One airplay) and also because asking Robert Wyatt to re-record it in English would have been an act of greed. This is for the Italian edition of the album, because the one intended for the rest of the world (yes, the album will be released in 32 countries, from India to New Zealand) will also contain the Italian versions of “Il mondo” and “L’uomo che non parla”, also from “Dove sei tu”.
But let’s get to the contents of the album. First of all, it must be said that these are not distorted versions, on the contrary, the original is faithfully reproduced (except here and there for some overdubs or extra vocal effects). The passage from Italian to English maintains the same metric, so that the melodic lines are not affected. And even the literary meaning often remains identical (with some small evolution, for example “Nel mio giardino” becomes “Yesterday’s film”).
The best moments are the opening of “Ultramarine” (“In fondo al mare”), “Milly’s song” (dedicated to Moor’s daughter), which in English really sounds like something out of a musical, and – definitely more incisive than in Italian, given their rock nature – “The Truman Show” and “Triathlon” (in the remix version by Samuel from Subsonica).
“Give it back” was already in English in “Dove sei tu”. And even if in “Invisible girl” Cristina sings “he don’t see you” (we know the prejudices that Italians enjoy abroad and perhaps a scholastic “he doesn’t” could have been there), her English is less improvised and more cultured than Elisa’s. But some songs lose a bit of that charm that our language possesses, depersonalized in the face of linguistic servility, as in “Wherever find you” and “One perfect day”.
Would the fans of the first hour have perhaps appreciated Donà also taking songs from the first two albums to “translate”? Could they have expected a new repertoire composed ad hoc instead of working on material already published? In any case, the album demonstrates how the choice of English is a necessity to make herself more accessible to the eyes of the international market, rather than an ambitious artistic whim.
