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Riccardo Tesi with Maurizio Geri
Acqua, foco e vento
Listen:
Poveri contadini
Violina
Codina
La ballata del carbonaro
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| "Riccardo Tesi is one of the world's great organetto (melodeon/button accordion) players, and has been around for a long time, despite having recorded relatively rarely. He is also very interested in the musical traditions of his home area, the mountains and valleys around Pistoia (about 30 kms NW of Florence) in northern Tuscany... [Maurizio Geri is] usually associated with more modern music. On Acqua foco e vento he is completely convincing in a more traditional setting. His voice is tuneful, clear and pleasant, yet - despite these normally pejorative adjectives - he is never annoyingly so here; indeed, he's a pleasure to listen to.... It's delightful music, beautifully performed, superbly recorded - and manages to be easy to listen to and extremely interesting at the same time. - Musical Traditions / Read Rod Stradling's complete and extensive review |
The musicians
More music by Riccardo Tesi
The official press on this release:
On track after track, using documents and field recordings made by musicologists in the 1970s, TESI and companions reconstruct a world of great beauty and musical perfection, eschewing the rhetoric often tied to the peasant world and offering the listener instead a panoply of gleaming sounds cleared of ideological rust.
Through a repertory of work songs, ballads, nursery rhymes, lullabies and love songs, the function this music had in the daily life of the Pistoia region's inhabitants once again becomes clear as does their relationship to their neighbours in the Grossetano and Senese areas, not to mention with Corsica where Pistoians went in search of seasonal work as shepherds and coalmen.
Acqua, foco e vento features rewritings and arrangements of considerable refinement which, setting philology aside, reveal a great affection for the tradition and a capacity to draw out its true essence.
Melodeon player RICCARDO TESI's long awaited new record is now available for his many fans to enjoy. Acqua, foco e vento is an elaborate exploration of Tuscan folklore, in particular that of the mountainous area surrounding the town of Pistoia.
With the help of a clutch of guest musicians (who show their passion and enthusiasm on all of the album's tracks) TESI reveals himself once again as a great connoisseur of Italian folk tradition, an artist dedicated to digging up his native musical heritage. His new CD provides the occasion for getting to know once again the art of a pastoral world that was quickly forgotten in the post-war period and almost definitively erased from collective memory in the 1960s on account of heavy urbanization and material "progress".
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