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Rating: Alice, Alice sings Satie, Fauré, Ravel. Mélodie passagère, 1988, Emi
Forced by a stubborn virus to a compulsory confinement within the four walls of our ancestral home, today, by perusing part of our vast discography, we have been able to ascertain, with barely concealed surprise, that it contains only works by white authors (apart from some laughable exceptions: rare aboriginal trinkets and a few Amerindian knick-knacks, kept there mainly for the sake of courtesy). Tout se tient. The organicity, compactness, and ethnic integrity of our bloated collection are therefore, we believe, a guarantee of a balanced judgment on the relationship between music and civilization; these characteristics were, moreover, providentially safeguarded in their time by the palingenetic cession forfait (to the extravagant stallholders of P.zza della Repubblica) of a rich anthology of demystifying jazz musicians: humanly intriguing, technically gifted, even extremely useful for a snob appetizer at the foot of Monte Soratte, but—we regret to reiterate—culturally lethal.
Indeed, the great Europoid tradition, before crumpling in the alienated deconstructions of some rogue with neither craft nor part (the enemy is internal! It's not black people…), produced, as a feverish swan song, scores that internalized, based on a delicate melancholic taste that already prophesied the collapse of the West (written, after all, in the very words: nomina omina), the minimalist intimacy that, with the apocalyptic turning of Kairos into Kronos, will become a mannerism for many wretched journeymen. A sort of "Ultima Thule" that, through a surreptitiously and reversely alchemical process, transfused the pure gold of Tradition into the lead of a sonic usurocracy for archeofuturistic monads.
Shortly after the sensational “Park Hotel” (1986), and just before the magnificently definitive “Il sole nella pioggia” (1989) and “Mezzogiorno sulle Alpi” (1992), Alice, the most sensitive Italian singer-songwriter of all time (though her recent collaboration with the diabolical Tiziano Ferro, on whom we would cast a merciful veil, is unforgivable), continues her charming gnostic-elegiac niche paths, in which she layers with unwavering sobriety a sensitivity that draws from the best post-romanticism, integrating and reformulating its inspirations with notes and architectures only superficially classical. The form-substance dialectic here shows all its vacuity, even in a metaphysical sense.
The undeniable, proverbial integrity of Alice's primarily aesthetic journey is analogous to the completeness of our collection; and from this, our contemplation on that takes its cue. Ferro can then be considered akin to an episodic chute, which in our encyclopedic anthology is represented by the sporadic ethnic nonsense, also used, with sovereign detachment, as eccentric embellishments.
The title of the magnum opus by the delightful chanteuse from Forlì is taken from a line by the great Prague-born R.M. Rilke (infinitely less popular than his fellow citizen, the psychoanalytic pest F. Kafka, who some still insist on calling a man of letters); the boldly retransmitted material is taken from three fundamental French composers, E. Satie, G. Fauré, J.M. Ravel, in a certain way musically akin and having lived in the same time frame (second half of the 19th-first half of the 20th century; C. Débussy is left out, perhaps due to his excessive symbolic-deconstructionist tendencies); the purpose of the metamusical discourse—additional, sacred and nuanced ridicule to the quantitative barbarity of modernity—is to render and transfigure the almost inscrutable movements of the Western soul, caught, at the moment of its fateful decline, contemplating the “cultural” ruins of its ancestral lands; the result, ever and forever in itinere, is immaculate (in the eschatological sense of the term).
Among the romances of the work, watercolors for voice and piano often just hinted at, are noteworthy "Elégie," by Satie, which manifests an existential threshold already patently cracked: "Le seul remède sur la terre,/à ma misère, est de pleurer"; "Après un rêve," by Fauré, more sustained, with beautiful vocalizations and sudden changes of tone by the woman from Forlì; obviously, the unsettling "Gnossienne n. 4," by Satie, reinterpreted with rigorous zeal, but not philologically; "Spleen," by Satie, small and collected, but almost explosive in vocal rendition; "Chanson médiévale," by Satie, with a distant scent of melancholic hope; "Kaddish," by Ravel, with a somewhat cloying traditional Hebrew text, where Alice seems almost like an L. Gerrard without primitivistic whims (here's the difference between being born in Romagna or Australia); again, the sublime inquietudes of "Gnossienne n. 1" by Satie; and the grand finale with the excellent "Pie Jesu," intelligently placed as a conclusion, taken from Fauré's "Messa di Requiem Op. 48": "Pie Jesu Domine/Dona Eis Sempiternam Requiem." Some central jokes, with a touch of the grotesque, could perhaps have been avoided.
The soundscape of a crucial recess in history as a micro- and macrocosmic drama, the epic of destiny, and the elegy of form: Europe, defeated in the transient expressions of becoming, triumphs forever in metastory.
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