Loreena McKennitt
The Book Of Secrets

For nine very long years, it remained her last album of original songs. Only a few months ago, she broke a silence that was starting to become concerning, even though from an authentic artist like Loreena McKennitt, completely unrelated to commercial logic, one certainly cannot expect the flat routine of an album every year or, at most, every two, perhaps filled with fillers but released at the right time to please the record label. At least because the record label (Quinlan Road) is her personal one, and this, aside from allowing her total expressive freedom, guarantees us listeners unique records, painstakingly crafted with meticulous care and artisanal passion, which stand out sharply amid the industrial "products" that crowd and often plague the music market.

It seems that with the very recent "An Ancient Muse" this extraordinary Canadian singer and multi-instrumentalist (she plays the harp, piano, and all kinds of keyboards) has confirmed her vocation as an ethnic musician in the broad sense, with horizons far wider than the essentially Celtic ones of her beginnings. While waiting to know something about it, one can already grasp the breadth of these horizons in "The Book Of Secrets" (1997), an album that, due to its care and contents, comes close to absolute perfection. Just take a look at the list of ethnic instruments used, worthy of a Peter Gabriel, to get an idea of the work underlying it and thus justify the long waits that Loreena imposes on us, even though in this specific case it was only three years, with moreover a precious Christmas gift in between like "A Winter Garden" (1995), an enchanting mini-album of only five tracks.

Another justification can be found by browsing her official site: Loreena is not only a sensitive artist but also a person committed as much as possible to fighting the distortions of the world, especially in the field of human rights, as evidenced by her close ties with Amnesty International. It's not surprising then if for some years she may have prioritized this activity, to then return to using the medium most familiar to her, music, to make a world that is not only unjust and cruel but also full of useless and annoying noises a better place, and who knows, maybe the two things are connected.

The scaruffian legend wants "The Book Of Secrets" to have been conceived during a journey undertaken by Loreena along the fascinating route of the Trans-Siberian. Other sources instead give this journey a more symbolic value, limiting the direct cause-effect relationship to only one track (the mysterious nocturnal ballad "Night Ride Across The Caucasus"). Be that as it may, like the two previous ones, this book of secrets by the red-haired Canadian also outlines itself as the story of a journey, both in space (from the Caucasus to the "Serenissima," from the East visited by Marco Polo to Dante's Florence) and in time (retrieving ancient, pre-Bachian sounds, especially in the use of strings).

This world is introduced to us by a kind of overture ("Prologue") of intense lyricism, with Loreena wielding her penetrating soprano highs in vocalizations so expressive and passionate that they do not require the support of words. The pulsations of the drums are rarefied and deep; metallic echoes of oriental instruments respond with a pleasant sitar effect. Although there is a break, the entry of "The Mummer's Dance" seems to occur seamlessly, so much is the climate now created. This "Dance of the Mimes" is a classic example of what in classical language would be called "Slow dragging" and also yet another demonstration, if it were still needed, that the strength of a rhythm is not measured by the number of beats per minute. It's not easy to resist these caressed congas, these muffled drums, this Arabic-like singing that accompanies the percussion: personally, I can't do it, and sooner or later I'm forced to move stealthily like the shadows of the nighttime forest described in the text, despite my bulk making this "bear dance" a bit grotesque.

"Skellig" offers us the enlightened seriousness of the spiritual testament of a wise man who is about to serenely pass into the afterlife, leaving us his books and his inner wealth, matured over the years spent inside a monastic cell with rock walls. Loreena recites this true poem with her most inspired singing; the enchanted melody and the perfect weavings of guitars and strings do the rest, melting even the most refractory hearts. In "Marco Polo" a thick carpet of percussion and Middle Eastern instruments provides the ideal backdrop to a heavenly Arabic-like chant, once again without words.

Words, however, abound in the 10 minutes of "The Highwayman": they are those of a poem by Alfred Noyes (in other cases, the lyrics, like the music, are by McKennitt herself). The duration should not frighten: just enter with the first verse into the atmosphere of this intense story of love and death between a bandit (highwayman) and the innkeeper's daughter, to be captivated until the end, which arrives in a flash also thanks to the dark and dramatic colors of the ballad that Loreena has managed to stitch onto these splendid words. "La Serenissima" is an open window to the most mysterious antiquity, a miniature instrumental for harp and strings that takes us back to the full '600s. By contrast, I am reminded of the dreadful mishmash bearing the same title, the work of the infamous (fortunately now defunct) Rondo Veneziano, a bland mix of Vivaldi reheated in a sauce of dull disco-rock arrangements. My goodness, what an abyss between these two "Serenissimas"!

"Night Ride Across The Caucasus" is another valid example of slow dragging: fleeting images of a nocturnal ride unfold to the gently relentless rhythm of the percussion between hills sleeping under the stars and forests dense with shadows, and in this silence resonate echoes, visions, reflections, the eternal questions and answers of one accustomed to reflection on themselves. In the finale, the album reaches its spiritual peak with "Dante's Prayer", the heartfelt prayer of a Dante imagined as not yet out of his "dark forest", in search of something or someone to give "his feet of clay wings to fly and touch the face of the stars". The music lives up to it: a haunting Monteverdian choir wraps the precious central core at the beginning and end in a somber veil, which like an urn contains the true prayer, housed in a finely woven piano and string arrangement and recited by Loreena with a sincerely moved voice.

Far from the new age wellness to which this musician is sometimes superficially associated: albums like this gift deep sensations that leave a mark.