Summary
This album is especially close to my heart, for more than one reason.
First, I wanted to pay tribute to the work of Maurice Ravel, who at the age of 20 harmonised and orchestrated these folk songs from my native island, Corsica – songs that bear true witness to our customs and our island history.
By coincidence, the manuscript of this vocal work is kept at the Musée de la Corse in Corte, the town where I grew up. That shows how symbolic this project is to me.
Second, I naturally wanted to sing my Corsica, this “mountain in the sea”, a land admired by Rousseau, Flaubert, Stendhal and Nietzsche, which inspired Mérimée, Matisse and Saint-Saëns, an island that took its full place in the Age of Enlightenment and gave birth to Napoleon… I wanted to pass on the strength that emanates from this ancestral land – “A Voce di a Terra”, the strength of the “Voice of the Earth”, which expresses our attachment to our roots, our values and our heritage, and which has always nourished my singing.
Finally, starting from these Corsican songs transfigured by Ravel – to which I have added our anthem, Diu Vi Salvi Regina, and, in an instrumental version, the most famous of our lullabies, Ciucciarella – I wanted to build a programme that celebrates the marriage between so-called “learned” classical music and so-called “folk” music… a bridge perfectly illustrated by Dvořák’s cycle of Gypsy Songs, the “Cigánské melodie”, by the best known of Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, “Baïlèro”, and by the most widely sung of Britten’s folk song arrangements, “The Last Rose of Summer”.
I also found this “voice of the earth” in the pages of the great operatic repertoire – that nostalgic attachment to one’s native land – sung, for example, by Tancredi in Gioachino Rossini’s opera of the same name, when the hero returns home for the first time after long years of exile... Or by Mignon in Ambroise Thomas’s opera of the same name… where the house she remembers inevitably reminds me of my own childhood home...
I hope that “A Voce di a Terra” will resonate in each of you as it resonates in me.
