Nigun (1997)

The lieder which come to us from the world of yiddishkeit are born from a people forever suspended between heaven and earth, between the divine and its absence, people on the run whose heart-rending gaze is turned towards its impossible roots. The fervor and the practice of the Torah, the attendance of the Messiah, the deviation towards all sorts of utopias, the overcoming of everyday problems and enjoyment of everyday achievements, the ecstatic and hyperkinetic praying during rites and festivities, cause this people of millenary children to sing.

The songs germinated fom the Yiddish language are, by origin, vocation and birth, "dirty", "poor" and, above all, anti-bourgeois in the lay sense of the term. In spite of this, they enter the houses of the well-off, the café-concerts, the cabarets, the theatres of the low and middle Jewish bourgeoisie, and also the houses of intellectuals and revolutionaries, of the outcasts and uprooted of every urban class. They meet the piano, an unknown instrument in their original musical breeding-ground, and become open to new ambiences. Their liederistic vocation finds new, unexpected and surprising lymph for their "dirty", passionate traditional melodies, in the encounter with the "totality" of the piano.

The almost four decades preceding the Second World War, see a frenetic growth of the pulsating Jewish life in central and eastern Europe. Yiddish poets and authors write hundreds of lieder and songs, even from their American "exile". The last voices, the last geatures from this world, spring like pearls of sound and music, extreme affirmations of life beyond the bite of silence and annihilation which will suffocate the breath of the people of these songs.

We sing them hoping in this way to cultivate the utopia of grasping a tail of this people's vestments. And they "sing" to us so that the impossible may find a space in which to prove itself in our hearts.
Moni Ovadia

To name Nigun (Melody) an album made up overwhelmingly of melodies for voice and piano may undoubtedly seem pleonastic. However, upon listening, one becomes clearly aware that even the authors of the pages written for solo piano recorded here, though extremely diverse in their musical itineraries, are united by a subtle but tenacious vein of lyricism. The sinuous melodic arches of Milhaud, the fresh and simple gait of Copland's music and the apparent post-minimalist immobility (which actually hides an intense melodic vein) of Lang have many more points in common than meets the eye (or ear). In these brief compositions, every other parameter – rythm, harmony, counterpoint – is subordinated to the melodic element; even the pianistic writing is totally alienated from virtuosistical exhibition and tends towards a dry essentiality, so as to focus mostly on the single phrases and allow the musical discourse to finally dissolve into song, melody, Nigun.
Carlo Boccadoro

Musicians:
>> Moni Ovadia: voice
>> Carlo Boccadoro: piano

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