Elena Somarè - Respiro (2021)

Elena Somarè, the main interpreter of the melodic whistle in Italy and in the world, in concert at the Orsini Chapel in Rome, Thursday 11 November at 7.00 pm, to present the new album “Respiro”. Introduced by the journalist Alberto Dentice.

On the stage of the Orsini Chapel, along with Elena Somarè, the harp and percussion of Lincoln Almada, the guitars of Mats Hedberg and the piano of Gianluca Massetti will also be present. With this line-up, Elena will also be back in concert on Tuesday 23 November and Tuesday 14 December.

In this third opera, after the great Neapolitan melodies in Incanto of 2016 and the South American repertoire of Aliento in 2019, Elena Somarè decides to interpret a repertoire of famous songs from the late 60s and 70s, Songs that have gone down in history as Blackbird by Beatles, Moonchild by King Crimson or By this River by Brian Eno. Many guests featured in the album: from Morgan Agren, Frank Zappa's last drummer, to the Berlin sound designer Bernhard Woestheinrich, but also the singer Ada Montellanico, the Roman bassist Fabrizio Sciannameo and, finally, Pat Mastelotto of King Crimson, with a symbolic homage in Blackbird.

A delicate and fascinating operation, and also a challenge, taken up by the Swedish guitarist Mats Hedberg, who is the arranger and mixer of the disc, by the harpist Lincoln Almada who is artistic supervisor and by the pianist Gianluca Massetti who arranged the keyboards.

The whistle is our most ancestral sound and the repertoire of this album was chosen precisely for the connection of the songs with nature. Elena Somaré's attempt is therefore to find a link, an ancestral and authentic reference to the environment through a more authentic voice. The sound of Elena Somarè's whistling voice is delicate, spiritual and sentimental at the same time, and with her the whistle becomes a magnificent instrument with unexplored expressive possibilities. But whistling is also an art. Being able to integrate this unusual sound with that of the instruments, as if it were the singing of a piece, requires a technique and a control that for Elena Somaré seem to be the most natural things in the world.

They say I'm a whistler - Elena declares - but it seems to me to sing. My whistle is an inner voice, which becomes a melody without the need for anything else. Except study, research, perfectionism and, of course, some great musicians, who help me in this artistic path.

History and tradition have not made life easy for this form of artistic expression. The whistle was identified as the voice of the devil, not surprisingly in Mephistopheles, by Arrigo Boito, the devil himself enters the scene whistling.

Yet there was someone else who broke the mold. Often women: the Italian Daisy Lumini, singer, composer and "whistle soloist", but, before her, the American Alice Show, who between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, embodying the suffragette revolt, left her husband and turned solo world of the whistle, taking his three children with him.

At the age of 6, she whistled the arias of her operas in front of her mother's friends, but her real audience only met him when her friend Ada Montellanico invited her to perform on the stage of the historic Alexanderplatz in Rome. After that many other things happened: from the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, continuing with many other concerts all over the world, in South Korea, at New York University, at the Sorbonne Auditorium in Abu Dhabi, at Palazzo Metternich in Vienna, the Italian Embassy in New Delhi and the Tèatrè dès Variètes in Montecarlo

Elena Somarè also collaborated on the soundtrack of Paolo Sorrentino's film "Loro 2", for which she performed two repertoire pieces and an original, Sea Whistle, composed by Lele Marchitelli, who edited and signed all the music of the movie. Elena was a wonderful surprise for me - declares Marchitelli - a great interpreter, an uncommon sensitivity and a surprising technique.
Still in the field of cinema, Elena Somaré also dubbed an actress with her melodic whistle in the film "Euforia", directed by Valeria Golino, presented at the 71st Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and interpreted by Riccardo Scamarcio, Valerio Mastandrea and Jasmine Trinca.