NOVI. She will be the singer Antonella Ruggiero (former voice of Matia Bazar), with his “Versatile Concert” to close at 9.30 pm tomorrow, Sunday 30 June, at the Resistenza park, the sixteenth edition of AiaFolkFestival, the event conceived and organized by the Coro Mondine of Novi. Accompanying Antonella on this journey are Roberto Olzer, on piano and liturgical organ and Roberto Colombo, vocoder and synth bass. The name of Antonella Ruggiero, one of the most versatile voices on the Italian scene, has spanned more than a quarter of a century of Italian music. With her songs she told and followed in parallel the evolution and trajectory of customs and taste of the general public.
First with Matia Bazar and then, since the 1990s, with a solo career as varied as it was successful, her ability as an interpreter, combined with a natural curiosity and a desire to go beyond the boundaries of traditional formulas and languages, has been able to touch fields and points that are virtually very distant from each other. These different experiences, which have matured over the years, are now proposed by Antonella in a concert that touches on all her greatest hits from “Vacanze romane” to the most recent “Echi d’infinito”, thus interpreting in a completely new way songs that have made the history of Italian pop music. But Antonella Ruggiero’s career has not stopped at pop: in recent years she has in fact crossed music linked to Western, Indian and African religious culture and then moved on to the atmospheres of Broadway, Portuguese fado, singer-songwriter music and Italy between the two wars. Pop, therefore, but also sacred music and world music in this recital that also reaches the songs of some famous Italian singer-songwriters, always discovering new ways of arrangement and interpretation.
But how does Antonella choose the songs to perform? «First of all, the song must move me and have a meaning – explains the artist – It has helped me a lot in these years, having worked with musicians of different backgrounds, who still know how to amaze. I love songs from the classical repertoire, but also from singer-songwriter music; being from Genoa I cannot fail to mention Fabrizio de André and Umberto Bindi. They are authors who I consider very inclined to a poetic vision of life. No concert is ever the same as another, in the sense that everything evolves differently, with the aim of presenting songs in a different guise, compared to the one the public already knows».
