Fairy Guitar Quartet
We are Francesco Fausto Magaletti, Roberta Mercorio, Astrid Mertens and Francesco Smirne.
We started playing together in 2019 and and our musical and personal bond grew stronger and stronger, so much that the desire to create an ensemble was born in us, which is why we founded the Fairy Guitar Quartet.
During these years we played a lot of differente repertoire, but of course we have always had a strong interest in the South American repertoire, but surely our encounters with the Argentinian viola da gamba player Luciana Elizondo and the Argentinian countertenor Maximiliano Baños reinforced our interest and made us fall in love with the Argentinian world.
Volver was born from this love.
Volver
"And even if I did not want to return, we always return to the first love"
These are some words that Carlos Gardel sang in his famous song “Volver”. Volver, to return.
Probably all of us have a place that we mourn, a place that we miss so much that it takes our breath away; no matter if that place is a spot or a person, it will always springs a series of controversial thoughts in us: if on the one hand what we most want is to return to that place or that person, on the other hand, the return scares us to death.
Lack implies the desire of a comeback, but the thought of a comeback implies fear: fear that that place has forgotten you, that it has replaced you with someone else, that there is no longer space for you, fear of the past, of memories, fear that the place you belong to is no longer the same as before.
The thought of returning implies the action of being gone, and if leaving is in the nature of a human being, so is returning.
"But the traveller who flees sooner or later stops going". Yes, because, as human beings, we are not good at staying, we need to go away, we need to discover new worlds and universes, but then, we need to return, but sometimes a physical return is not possible and so we resort to imagination.
"I imagine the flicker of the lights in the distance underlining my return"
Volver was written in 1934 and yet it is extraordinarily current: just think of brain drains forced to find work far from their homeland, just think of a long-distance relationship, just think of a war refugee forced to leave his homeland and destroyed by the thought of returning and by the knowledge that when he will return, probably nothing will be like before, and it is why we grab on to the memory, and it is why we start to “live with the soul clinging to a sweet memory that we cry again”.
Volver was composed on the lyrics of Alfredo Le Pera, with whom Gardel unfortunately did not shared only the wonder of this song, but also the tragic plane crash that led to both their deaths.
The theme of the return is a very recurring theme in Argentine music, and it is a theme that roused a series of emotions in usand allowed us to establish an indissoluble bond with the South- American folklore.
This is why we decided to name our project Volver, a CD that embraces the Argentine folklore. Volver wants to be a journey, a spatial but also temporal journey. Volver wants to collect and tell stories, true stories, stories that narrate the daily life of the Argentina of the past, that land that has hosted millions of Italians from the 19th century to the present day and that is therefore a land that we feel is close to us even though it is thousands of kilometers away.
We will narrate these stories through three of the most recurrent expressions in Argentine folklore: the tango, the milonga and the zamba.We will illustrate the tango of Carlos Gardel and Aníbal Troilo, the tango that was born in the suburbs of South America, in those barrios where we can still hear the echo of a bandoneón merging with the laughter of children playing in the streets. We will talk about that tango full of passion, sensuality, brazenness, nostalgia and pain, that tango soaked in duende, that tango that caused such a stir in the West because it was not yet ready to listen to stories full of machismo and violence, stories of uncomfortable truths.
We will also narrate the Piazzolla's Nuevo tango, who managed, in his music, to fuse the popular character with the cultured style learnt in France.
The strong character of the tango will be accompanied by the sweeter and more romantic character of the zamba, playing pieces by Ariel Ramírez, Gustavo Cuchi Leguizamón and Daniel Toro. Here again, the pieces will be explicative of the other Argentine character's side of the coin, but the theme of return will always be present, hiding between the pain of a lost love and the grief due to the suicide of Alfonsina Storni.
Volver is a project that aims to disseminate Argentine folklore, a cultural heritage with an enormous evocative power, a fortune that deserves to be known and loved, an immense patrimony that has broadened our horizons by immersing us in a new reality that has allowed us to break down infinite barriers.