REVIEWS

A REVIEW OF 'PLAINS OF PO' -- PERCORSI MUSICALI -- 11 May 2025
Ana Spasić opens worlds with a great voice! the simplicity of sound management encounters a limit in the interference of a musical post-modernism that contains elements of jazz, neoclassical, and light electronics,
Perfect testimony of a human metaphor, of its condition of existence: we live between improbable ecstasies and certain disorientations, unable to eliminate pain but at the same time aware of an overwhelming hope.
And in these contradictions that are offered to us, in the end, we surrender to fate.
With a tremendously effective and penetrating soprano timbre, Spasić covers 2/3 of the sensitivity of Wallace's poems with a lyrical pose, full of pathos and vibrato management, and for about 1/3 (In the Future and Butterfly on a Grinding Wheel) she sinks into a slow song-speech dynamic that would suit a jazz singer with pop inflections during the performance of a ballad.
Wallace's poems leave room for a contrast between two defining situations: on one side, an exceptional freedom and flexibility of the poetic bearing, on the other, moments of great dissatisfaction, close to anger.
Bertoldi's clouds perfectly adapt to the poetic evidence of Wallace, just as Spasić's woven song is a panacea for expression, capable of giving an immediate face to the contradictions presented by poetry: on one side the Po, 'merciless landscape of Northern Italy,' the war with 'bronze melted into cannons,' or the unhappiness of 'if flowers could speak, we would hate them'.
And on the other hand, the ecstasy of 'salvation in the sun-drenched garden!', or of 'being reborn once again' after a plethora of sensations of a faded civilization.
Ettore Garcia, Il progetto interdisciplinare di Ana Spasić: The Plains
of Po, 'Percorsi Musicali'

Ettore Garzia: Music writer, independent researcher and founder of the magazine 'Percorsi Musicali'. He studied music, he wrote hundreads of essays and reviews of cds and books (over 2000 articles) and his work is widely appreciated in Italy and abroad via quotations, texts', translations, biographies, liner notes for prestigious composers, musicians and labels. He provides a modern conception of musical listening, which meditates on history, on the aesthetic seductions of sounds, on interdisciplinary relationships with other arts and cognitive sciences.

by Bob Acciarino

THE SCENE DEC 2024 (US)