PRESS RELEASE (22/07/2014)
Wednesday, July 23, a Loano, the “voices” of tradition Piedmontese and Calabrian meet on the stage of the tenth edition of the City of Loano National Award for Italian Traditional Music.
In the afternoon, at 6:30 pm, on the waterfront, in the Nassiriya Fallen Gardens, Mimmo Cavallaro,interpreter of the Calabrian musical tradition, will present his double album “Sacred and Profane” (2014, CNI). Born and living in the cultural area of which he is a spokesman, he has always conducted his particular research through “field investigations,” recording the voices of the last direct witnesses of that musical reality.
In 2014, Mimmo Cavallaro decided to use the material collected over the years and create a new artistic project that encompasses the most significant songs from his research period, dividing them into two categories: those of a sacred nature (Christmas songs and Easter songs) and those of a secular nature (songs of love, departure, disdain and episodes of daily life related to the world of work).
At 9:30 pm, always on the waterfront, in the cultural space Maccagli Garden, the theme of “voice” returns, which on this evening will become a tale, the one handed down by Piedmontese oral tradition, collected by researchers Costantino Nigra, Leone Sinigaglia and Giuseppe Ferraro and reinterpreted by the musical group Din Dùn. It will be a concert telling stories of men and women, stories handed down through folk song. A music balanced between traditional and contemporary sounds, a music that takes care of the enchantment and purity of ancient voices.
On the CD “Maijn,” which will be presented in the concert, Din Dùn will perform a selection of traditional Piedmontese repertoire alongside some original pieces. Alessandra Patrucco e Angelo Conto renew their collaboration in this second work on tradition and contemporaneity, after “Varda la luna” with the group Sasà (Nota, 2007). Along with them on the hurdy gurdy, Francis Busso.
In the evening, the ethnomusicologist and researcher from Genoa will be presented with the Mauro Balma the 2014 Cultural Reality Award. The award was given to himfor his more than 30 years of meticulous work on such a stratified and complex territory as the Riviera and Apennine Liguri. A work in which he involved every form of documentation (paper, phonographic, audiovisual) to give the repositories of the oral culture of those areas a full voice, unmediated by third parties or hearsay. In addition to this, the processing of the material he has collected over time has enabled us to be able to draw an increasingly detailed and vivid picture of our region's musical traditions and their facets, which are still in the process of becoming or being reworked.
Until the Aug. 20, you can admire the exhibition “10 Years of Traditional Music, a photographic trail that will wind along the city streets. Shots recalling the most significant moments experienced in different corners of the city were taken by photographers Silvio Massolo e Martin Cervelli.
The City of Loano Award, under theartistic direction of music journalist John Vignola, is organized by the’Society of the Curious Association in collaboration with the’Department of Tourism and Culture
of the City of Loano, with contributions from the Liguria Region, A. Foundation De Mari and the sponsorship of the
Savona Province, of the’ANCI and the MEI.
The event is organized with the contribution and collaboration of Double J Ltd. Supermarket Management, Grand Hotel Garden Lido and Excelsior Hotel, Technique.
