Sometimes there are perfect combinations in which a harmonious fusion is achieved between space and music. It happens at the Teatro Arciliuto in Rome, which hosts Federico Sirianni, the award-winning Genoese singer, for a concert with intimate and enveloping atmospheres on Thursday April 4th. It is difficult not to mention theater song when Sirianni, a refined singer-songwriter who over the years has been able to build a unique and incomparable musical background, is performing on stage, drawing however from the musical poetry of Giorgio Gaber and Vinicio Capossela, of Fabrizio de Andrè and Bruno Lauzi, of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
Worthy heir of the Genoese school of the 1960s, Federico Sirianni goes far beyond that cultural and artistic movement, overcoming territorial and intellectual boundaries, falling in love with other cultures such as that of Eastern Europe and Portugal. His works are concept albums that lead the listener through journeys into the contemporary, into our human and inhuman being. Easy with him to slip from American atmospheres narrated on the road, to folk suggestions of Balkan taste, whose notes will make you move in your chair. If the intimacy of songs like Snow and Melody for tired eyes accompanies us on soft, almost whispered sounds, the contemptuous irony of Nato sfasciato takes us back to the bitter truth of those who take life ‘in the backside’, to quote the same author.
Federico Sirianni’s lexical research is accurate, sophisticated, lucid, direct, so much so that you even fall in love with certain words that you would say well-chosen, sometimes perfect. How can we not be overwhelmed by an anise sky, by a love that goes to the bottom like the Christ of the abyss, a crystal that can melt upon your clothes? Phrases that, knotted like silk scarves to the notes that accompany them, draw delicate poetry maps. A warm voice, sometimes hoarse, makes us feel at home while we listen to a sound that is familiar to an artistic background known to us, because it is that of a good Italian songwriter.
He tells stories, Sirianni: stories he meets on the street, at the bar, stories he casually encounters, or sometimes he goes looking for them, and he makes them his own, catching them on paper and playing them with the guitar to turn them into sinuous ballads. An artist who is a storyteller, a visionary, an illusionist capable of lifting us lightly on the thread of the story even if we sit in a comfortable armchair.
And if we listen to him inside the Arciliuto theater in Rome then the magic is fully fulfilled, because there can be no place more artistically seductive than this small theater built inside a 16th century residence. The Arciliuto was born as a theater in 1967 inside Palazzo Chiovenda, designed and built in the sixteenth century by the great architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, a disciple of Raphael. Here the walls exude art, history, poetry. And by letting yourself be enveloped by the warm stone of the walls alternating with the dark red of the floor, you are prepared for a journey without a return to the precipice of the human soul.
Federico Sirianni, Thursday, April 4th. Arciliuto Theater, piazza di Montevecchio 5, Rome. Tel. 06 6879419 –info@arciliuto.it.