L’osteria del fojonco
The Violini di Santa Vittoria are a string ensemble (a quintet: Davide Bizzarri, Roberto Mattioli, Orfeo Bossini, Luigi Andreoli, Filippo Pedol) regularly active in the province of Reggio Emilia, who in this disc, designed by Andrea Bonacini, collaborating with Tesi and saxophonist Claudio Carboni repropose music written in the last century by Arnaldo Bagnoli (1893-1965), a prolific violinist and composer-he signed at least three hundred instrumental pieces. There are, on the CD, also a traditional (“Secondo Maggio”/”Primo Maggio”), a Verdian piece (the Prelude from “Traviata”), an original by Tesi (“La mazurca del nonno”), one by Carboni (“Vittoria”) and one, “Tango del fojonco,” by Davide Bizzarri, who also did the arrangements of the pieces. But they are so respectfully consistent with Bagnoli’s music that they are essentially indistinguishable from it.
Here we go to mazurkas, polkas, waltzes (dances that certain know-it-alls who stuff their mouths with “square dance” and other exotic oddities will perhaps scoff at, but which instead belong fully to our European culture-remember Battiato’s “Voglio vederti danzare”? “In Northern Ireland, in summer dance halls, elderly couples dancing to the rhythm of seven eighths,” and shortly after “in the lower Po Valley, in summer dance halls, elderly couples dancing old Viennese waltzes.” And there is also a funeral march, “Remembrance” (a waltz, in fact).
TRACKS
