Discography

The story behind | LYRICS AND LISTENING | CREDITS

IL FIORE SPLENDENTE ¹ ~ The dazzling flower

I would like to dedicate this project  to the important but unregarded generation of Arabic poets who lived in and wrote about Sicily between the 9th and the 12th century.
Based on the images in which this dreamy, picturesque, refined and enthusiastic poetry describes a gorgeous Sicily to us, of whose gardens remain only a pale memory today, and of the woes and pain of its loss about which the verses of Ibn Hamdis (1052-1132),  speak, it is my wish to build an imaginary bridge between the past and present. To this end may the poets` feelings serve me: „Images which are so far away that they appear to be illusions, which nevertheless bloom like flowers in the web of verse from yonder time“.²

Etta Scollo’s compositions were recorded with the Wroclaw Score Orchestra conducted by Joris Barstch, together with the exquisite palermitan string quartet Ottava Nota, the lutenist Sebastiano Scollo and the poly-instrumentalist Fabio Tricomi, both of whom are experts for a repertoire of mediterranean tradition. They integrate themselves with their select traditional instruments from Sicily and the Levant and in interchange with the quartet and the orchestra in a double confrontation between past and present: On the one hand medieval times, represented in the sounds of still living musical mediterranean tradition, and on the other hand the same tradition and a „continental“ representation of modernity which can act as an antidote to the uneasiness which todays idea of multiculturality is encumbered with.

The musical arrangements originate from Etta Scollo in collaboration with Peter Hinderthür, Ferdinand von Seebach and Jan-Peter Klöpfel.

The project has been enriched by the much appreciated contribution of several outstanding figures of the international music scene, including Maestro
Franco Battiato, cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima and Monika Leskovar, Nabil Salameh,  singer and leader of the multicultural band Radiodervish, the composer and Trumpet player Markus Stockhausen, the soprano Cécile Kempenaers and the actor and singer-songwriter Alain Croubalian.

¹the title was inspired by a text by Inb Qalâquis.

² See Antologia die poeti arabi di Sicilia, published by Francesca M. Corrao © 2002 Mesogea by GEM srl, from wich all the texts and translations on the cd were taken).