Vangelis & Milva
Tra due sogni

Milva, abducted by Morpheus and inspired by Orpheus, manages, with this collection of tracks, to enchant the souls that turn to her voice to undertake a journey towards unconscious paths. Vangelis, with his keyboards and hypnotic synthesizers, provides the right complement to this dreamlike album.

The performer, perhaps on the same night or perhaps on two successive nights, had two dreams only to gift us with one through the recording of this work.

"É dentro me l'eco di un canto che va a Lloret e porta via con i ricordi la mia nostalgia". Thus begins the journey among the two dreamlike constructions of the singer. The Echo, the nostalgia, the rarefaction, constitute the intention of the work, well declared from its very first notes. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine that Milva's voice can become rarefied, so dark and imperious and sensual, as it is usually identified. In effect, this overwhelming voice is difficult to make glide; thus, it leads one to think that the second dream recorded in this album is none other than the voice itself narrating the first. Always in the first track of the album, we can hear "e mi voltai come in un sogno e mai piu mi svegliai". But let's detach ourselves from the echo of this first melancholic song to move forward. The melancholy becomes cruder and turns into anxious conscious impotence: "forse sono amanti di passaggio, Stan provando il nostro gioco, che brivido [...] Guarda sono naufraghi sfiniti e la notte spegne i fuochi anche per noi, ma non vorrei, sogna con me".

Thanks to the second track, we are introduced to the second dream. In this album, there is, therefore, one dream that resides far away in time and space, in memory, and one dream that is a projection of an impossible future.

We move on to the third track to try to grasp some more information: "Un pomeriggio e 1/2". Does the title perhaps designate the time of reflection? If we were to try to position ourselves between one of the two poles present in the album; if we were to try to position ourselves "Between (the) two dreams", it seems to me that this image is, in reality, outside and that it was the fragment of lived experience that generated the psychic activity that unfolds in sleep. Here the tones become sensual while describing two lovers with cinematic shots: "Lampi, magia e volano via".

The next track, however, brings more subdued tones and is cloaked in a yearning melancholy. It describes a "Desiderato sogno"; a man who, like a good, longed-for dream, is seen from the penumbra of a theater, photographed under the spotlight of a scene.

How much fiction in this album: cinema, theater, a dream within a dream...metatheater...how much seduction.

Halfway through the album, Milva, entirely taken by this seduction, self-reports, in a humorous citation piece, continuing the inlay of chimeras within chimeras: "je garde mon secret, la Carmen che c'è in me".

The representation becomes, rushing towards the end, more frantic: he wants to leave and she pleads with him, even knowing that the game isn't worth the candle (they are transient lovers; friends with benefits we would say today, with much less elegance). Within this "episode", namely "A tradimento", is what I consider the most beautiful line of all: "lavorerò io, ti vestirò io, ti spoglierò io e tu sarai sempre in credito". But let's not dwell too much to avoid losing the frenzy that one breathes as we head towards the finale. He wants to leave, we said. She, increasingly lost in her deserts, forgets the sweetest pleas to propose more sex to him, in the fourth last track, "Blue notte". In the third last track, "Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall", Milva is now fully aware of the defeat of the story narrated and sings: "now our love is gone". As a penultimate instance, we return to nostalgia for the past with "Un altro maggio". The return to the theme that opened the album warns us that Milva is waking up. We have reached the finale, and the singer reveals everything to us:

"Sì, l'alba era più forte, sì, vince i sogni la realtà, eppure solo in sogno viene a noi la verità. Cosi si chiude un fiore se il sole non c'è più, ma tutto il suo colore raccoglie in sé"

Reality wins over the dream merely by virtue of its tangibility, but, while we live, we remove from our consciousness things that dreams inevitably speak to us about. Flowers close, but even without having petals spread to the sun, they carry in themselves all their truth.