Giuni Russo, the beginning and the end

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Giuni Russo’s death, unfortunately very premature. On this day I went to recover the first article I wrote about her: the press release, on behalf of CGD, of the album “Energie”, released in 1981. Below that you will find the article I wrote on the day the news of her death arrived.

It’s a way of paying homage to an artist and a woman who I miss very much, and who music misses very much.

Giuni Russo, “Energies” (CGD 20269)

“I could sing you Bellini’s Norma, with Sardinian or Japanese phonemes…”. Is it a promise or a threat? It is in any case the declaration of intent of Giuni Russo, a fellow countrywoman and new “pupil” of the brilliant Sicilian Franco Battiato, who pushed her and helped her to create an album, “Energie”, in many ways astonishing.
Even just by scrolling through the lyrics of the songs collected in the 33 rpm one can immediately see how they are ideally connected to the typical situations of the most elusive Battiato: Lawrence of Arabia and Governors of Libya, neoclassical houses and military artillery fields.

figurines to cut out from the pages of the 1936 “Corrierino dei Piccoli”, “glue onto cardboard and fold the flap to make them stand up”. The melodies on which Battiato’s ectoplasms take shape are spiral and angular, majestic and insinuating; here and there, with mocking malice, quotations from Italian melodrama are scattered, and even an “O’ sole mio” that seems to have been recovered from an old Piedigrotta.
The arrangements – for which Battiato is also responsible, with the complicity of Giusto Pio and Alberto Radius, who produced the album, making his studio available for the recording – suggest urban anguish and cosmic despair, now recovering the cadences of military marches, now the thrills of “Belle Epoque” songs, now symphonic and operatic suggestions, now “popular tavern songs”.
And above all this – in perfect amalgam, yet splendidly “solitary”, like a rough diamond, sharp and harsh but very bright – unexpected and alien, the incredible voice of Giuni Russo; capable of sonic peaks and abysses, capable of lacerating high notes and complicit whispers, capable of airy singing and chipped and sharp sobs.
Giuni Russo’s voice is a gift of nature that is both accepted and denied: launching its attack with an oblique strategy and deviant tactics, it does not shatter glasses but irreparably cracks the hearts and minds of those who listen to it.
Her vibrant and tense vocality evokes oriental scents (“Tappeto volante”), African vibrations (“Lettera al Governatore della Libia”) and Central European cultures (“Il sole di Austerlitz”); she explores urban discomforts (“Crisi metropolitana”) and emotional memories (“Atmosfera”); she psychoanalyses adolescent dreams (“L’addio”) and erotic imbalances (“L’attesa”); finally reaching, with a mocking somersault, the extreme limit of self-irony (“Una vipera sarà”).
Giuni Russo’s incandescent throat transforms into a real instrument, becoming at times indistinguishable, for clarity and metallicity, from the sounds produced by electric instruments; but without ever risking the exhibition as an end in itself, remaining firmly in balance between the cultural game and the somersault of the street acrobat.
“It is not for presumption, but only for essence”: this is the point. And it is a point light years away from any other musical expression that today offers: Giuni Russo is of yesterday and tomorrow, she escapes the pin that would like to nail her to catalogue her; mysterious cocoon, translucent chrysalis, iridescent butterfly, she absorbs, reflects and refracts the light of day and the darkness of night.
This album is the first “out-of-text plate” of his atlas: we are already too eager to discover the next ones.

(October 1981)

On the death of Giuni Russo

It wasn’t easy trying to be friends with Giuni Russo.

I tried for more than twenty years, and I know I succeeded only in fits and starts – only when she was happy that we were friends. I write this now, but she knew how I thought – right, Antonietta? Like all people with character, Giuni was capable of having a terrible temper (“If I were nicer I’d be less unpleasant”, she sang). But when you love someone, you appreciate them, you admire them, you are willing to accept them as they are. And I loved Giuni, I admired her a lot as an artist – since the early 1980s, when I met her in person, but also before, from a strange album of hers on the BASF label entitled “Love is a woman” – and I appreciated her as a woman. Yes, I know: she was moody, irritable, sometimes fierce in her enmities, sometimes – as happens to many artists – more ready to ask than to thank. But she was a truly extraordinary woman, as long as she was well. And when she began to feel ill, she was an extraordinary woman. She never, not even for a moment, wanted anyone to know about the disease that was eating her. She faced the pain with courage and pride, leaning on what she believed in: her spirit, and her voice – her voice. The tenacity with which she continued to sing, even in these last terrible years of hers, had something heroic, sublime – or crazy, wonderfully crazy.
Also for this – not only for this – I tried, together with a few others, to support her in this effort. Also for this I am, now, already pissed off. Because from today we will begin to hear and read the words of the coyotes: of those who forgot about her for years, of those who didn’t help her when she needed it, of those who didn’t want to give her a hand.
I know you all, one by one, by name and surname: you who helped her, and you are few. And you who did not help her, and you are many. You who did not want to reprint on CD her most epochal and masterful album, “Energie” – and I asked you, at least three times, even me personally. You who did not want to talk and write about her last, laborious, imperfect works. You who did not accept the request to invite her, at least once, to that review of friends of the great tenor in which dogs and pigs participated – and for her, who instead was among the very few to have his merits and qualities, it would have been a satisfaction, even if belated. You who from now, from tomorrow, will fill your mouths and pages with the usual beautiful words, those that are said of the dead. I wish you to drown in your unsold records, to suffocate yourselves with your words, to strangle yourselves with the paper of your newspapers: you hypocrites, you false, you liars, you whitewashed tombs.
Have the decency to be silent. At least that. Let us listen to Giuni’s voice, so strong and pure that it rises to heaven without effort.

(September 2004)