Angelo Branduardi is an Italian folk/folk rock singer-songwriter and composer who scored relative success in Italy and European countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Greece.
Biography
Branduardi was born in Cuggiono, a small town in the province of Milan, but early moved with the family to Genoa. He was educated as a classical violinist in the Genoa music conservatory, Niccolò Paganini. At the age of 18, he composed the music for the Confessioni di un malandrino by Sergei Yesenin. He is married to Luisa Zappa, who wrote the lyrics for many of his songs. They have two daughters, Sarah and Maddalena, both musicians.
Works
The beginnings
Branduardi's first album was never released, and resulted from a co-operation with Maurizio Fabrizio, composer and gifted performer. The first released album, Angelo Branduardi '74 was arranged with Paul Buckmaster.
La Luna, including "Hooligan's Confession" and the fine, delicate song giving the LP its name, was a prelude to the success of the following works. Alla fiera dell'Est was Branduardi's first vastly popular album, followed by La Pulce d'Acqua and Cogli la prima mela. Lyrics for the English versions of Branduardi's albums were written by Peter Sinfield, also lyricist for King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. In those albums, Branduardi exploited themes and patterns from early music, mostly Renaissance and early Baroque. The song "Alla fiera dell'Est" is still popular among Italians of every age, who test themselves committing to memory all the fable-like, repetitive lyrics. It is based on an old Jewish song in Aramaic sung at the end of the Passover Seder night service. In 2007 "Alla fiera dell'Est" was covered by Israeli singer Shlomi Shabat for a Passover time commercial for cellphone company Pelephone. Lyrics had a broad spectrum of inspiration: a Danse macabre, the theme of Satan's mistress, Chinese, Native American and Druidic tradition, the apocryphal Gospels. Concertation owes much to the talents of Maurizio Fabrizio, and exploits unusual instruments for pop music: dulcimer, Pan flute, lute, clarinet, among others – mixed with more standard guitar, bass and drums.
Experimentation and crisis
Subsequent albums showed an increasing desire towards experimentation and differentiation. Branduardi had a more intimate tone, Cercando l'oro had very sophisticated and delicate arrangements, Branduardi canta Yeats was a tribute to William Butler Yeats. Pane e rose was a still inspired, but increasingly dark picture of life and death. Il Ladro marked a very delicate point of Branduardi's life, edging on depression, echoed in a dark, almost cemeterial, style of singing. The album Si può fare brought back Branduardi to normality, but the artist is now struggling to evade the minstrel character which was now too tight for him. In 1994, he published Domenica e lunedì, dedicated to the Italian poetFranco Fortini who was one of Branduardi's professors in his school years.
New directions
In 1996, during the celebrations for the restoration of the Duomo of Spilimbergo after the catastrophic 1976 earthquake, he recorded the albumFuturo antico, in which he, as an early Baroque musician, keeps reusing, mixing, wording pre-existing material along with his own. This experience, accomplished with the aid of musicians and musicologists, continued with Futuro antico II and Futuro antico III. The same year he performed "Te vojo 'bbene assaje" with Italian pop singer Eugenio Finardi. In 1998, Branduardi teamed up with Italian stand-up comedian and writer Giorgio Faletti for Il dito e la luna. He subsequently reworked earlier musical themes with writings of and about St. Francis to produce L'infinitamente piccolo ; he wrote a musical on the same topic. In 2003, a new album, Altro ed altrove, in a time period marked by a rise of racism and intolerance, brought together love stories from several cultures. For the last 10 years, his band, on stage, has been composed of Davide Raggazoni, Michele Ascolese, Leonardo Pieri and Stefano Olivato, or with Ellade Bandini and Maurizio Fabrizio.
