Giancarlo Onorato
Sangue bianco

On the fringes of the spotlight, not entirely supported by adequate critical recognition, the Monza-born singer-songwriter Giancarlo Onorato has long carved out an autonomous space for himself, distinguishing himself, in a landscape of expressive saturation, in the difficult task of creating an original musical identity, free from trends and devoid of stylistic antecedents, capable of sustaining itself, without diminishing, along a path that now boasts, with this recent "Sangue Bianco," four collections born from solid and personal expressive coherence.

Already in previous albums, and particularly in "Io sono l'Angelo," released at the end of the Nineties and still his masterpiece, the traits of his talent were immediately evident: that charming blend of voice and sound from which poignant vibrations and contagious atmospheres of amazed ecstasy emerge; that flow of melancholy escaping the confines of private endurance to open up to a song of universal love, with strong spiritual and religious connotations. However, Onorato's religiosity is devoid of commandments, non-prescriptive, while the sweetness, expanded in the magnetism of enveloping spirals, eludes its pitfalls to align to a cosmic tone, merging everything into a core of panicked density, in a mysticism anchored to the emotional and existential events of mankind.

In "Sangue Bianco" the rigor of musical research once again involves the lyrics. As in previous works, Onorato relies on the contribution of the brilliant Milanese poet Anna Lamberti-Bocconi, here with an adaptation of her poem "Il carnevale dei morti." A result of the elaboration of other lyrics, those of the German poet Else Lasker-Schüler, is the song "Else Lied," where almost cloistered essentiality opens unexpected vertiginous spaces, of light azure, traversed by clear ventilations. Another poetic intersection with a text by Paola De Benedictis, "Io ti battezzo." Here, solemn and rarefied piano chords, distant from each other, introduce a high-temperature text, a mysticism enacted in the rituals of a liberating sacrifice. In the two songs, "L'illusione di salvezza" and "Il tuo venire," Onorato's typical sounds seem to embrace musical echoes of past decades, sometimes vaguely beat, amalgamated into a seamless blend. In the closing track of the CD, "Reginebambine," the lullaby-like circularity of the music is that of "an enchanted sounder, a healing healer," an unspoken and incomplete wizard, a mutilated demiurge who summons, to the sound of what could be a cosmic organ or a sideral music box, a universe of "tender mothers, of girl jellyfish" for the reunification of two separate worlds, under the miraculous sign of regeneration.

Onorato is a dweller of open spaces, a Rilkean angel located in the intangible regions between the visible and invisible, plenipotentiary of deities in love and converging with the very forms of nature and spaces.

As the title of the album already signals to us, he is a devotee of oxymorons, of sensory and lexical combinations that initially seem jarring, because spiritual elevation involves the processing of both joy and pain. And the mark of scars is an indispensable and natural element through which to mature our ecstatic fullness. The ulcerating thorns, the wounds free themselves from purely afflictive values, shedding their burdensome sign to be hurled, like liberating consolidations, into the great mix of universal cycles.

For Onorato, the connection between private love and universal love represents a crucial aspect, to the point of the confluence of these two elements into a continuum devoid of dissonance. Even when love seems to be celebrated according to private rituals, as in the first part of the song "Il nostro fiero canto" ("the sun dies only for us"), the final outcome reveals a connection with the secret lymphs of nature and myth ("our legs of cedar blood / are prophets' fathers and kings' mothers"). There can be no private gardens for those who flow in the veins of the Cosmos intersecting with the very springs of the divine.

Stefano Cardarelli