Patrizia Laquidara e Hotel Rif
Il canto dell'anguana

Patrizia Laquidara is our Teresa Salgueiro. Now I'm sure of it. The already successful experiments in Portuguese with "Para você querido Caé" (2001) and the strong Latin reminiscences of her two albums "indirizzo portoghese" (2003) and Funambola (2007) were not enough to convince me. It took an album in the Alto Vicentino dialect to allow me to forge an indissoluble bond between the beautiful voice of the Veneto-Sicilian performer and songwriter and the atmosphere of Madredeus. Listen, for example, to the long lullaby of "la fumana" (sample) to understand how tight is Patrizia's embrace with the wonders of Ainda.

This "Canto dell'anguana" is a return to the harbor for Patrizia. After years of traveling, discoveries, important encounters (Funambola was produced by Arto Lindsay), the beautiful Patrizia decided to gather musician friends, the Hotel Rif, and poets, the lyricist Enio Sartori, to embark on a backward journey to discover her own popular roots. The anguana sung about is a figure part woman and part serpent-dragoness to whom both beneficial (creator fertility, child-rearing) and malevolent powers (child abduction, seducer of men) are attributed and which has permeated the Venetian oral tradition for centuries. Along this basic opposition unfolds an album that embodies not only the Brazilian-Portuguese atmospheres mentioned earlier but also Balkan plots, more nationally popular textures, and even Irish jigs.

Patrizia's precise voice, even live, knows how to surpass the wildest Bregovic in "ah Jente de la me tera" and land immediately afterward in the choral sean nos of "nota d'Anguana" (this one as well as others sung together with the local Canterine del Feo) without the discourse losing cohesion and pathos.

A work played and sung wonderfully, written by Sartori and set to music by Hotel Rif and Laquidara herself. A return home that doesn't close the door behind itself but instead leaves the magical world of Patrizia wide open. A world her voice has traveled far and wide and which today allows me to admire.