the career of a ‘never-ending’ voice • il Millimetro

(Adnkronos) – Neither a tiger (from Cremona) like Mina, nor a panther (from Goro) like Milva, not to mention eagles and nightingales… If anything, she could be defined as a lioness (from Milan, where she was born on September 22, 1934) in spirit and royalty. But Ornella Vanoni, even on the occasion of her 90th birthday, continues to be herself and nothing else, without any other nicknames taken from the common bestiary, apart from that of ‘singer of the underworld’ given to her very reductively at the beginning of her career and then rightly forgotten. More than a singer with a unique, sophisticated and highly recognizable voice, she is an interpreter, also in the theatrical sense of the word, given that her ‘incipit’ is linked precisely to the world of theater, or rather of the Piccolo Teatro directed by Giorgio Strehler, her mentor and also companion for a period of her life. Her debut as an actress preceded her debut as a singer by a year in 1957, but the two things in her were never separated; it is no coincidence that her first tour was in Spoleto in 1959 for the Festival dei Due Mondi and to propose her already famous ‘songs of the underworld’, first of all: ‘Ma mi’ in Milanese dialect set in the San Vittore prison; and ‘Le Mantellate’ in Roman dialect about the women’s penitentiary; as well as pieces from ‘The Threepenny Opera’ by Bertolt Brecht. After the end of her relationship with Strehler and the Piccolo in Milan, the Sixties marked the beginning of a season of great interpretations of works by singer-songwriters for Ornella Vanoni, one above all: Gino Paoli (who turns 90 on Monday 23 September) who composed ‘Senza fine’ for her and to celebrate an intense love story, the first great musical success, also international, for Ornella, who in the meantime married the theatre impresario Lucio Ardenzi. And she returned to the theatre briefly as co-star of the musical ‘Rugantino’ by Garinei & Giovannini, starting from the Sistina and arriving at Broadway. An uninterrupted chain of successful songs followed: ‘Che cosa c’è’, ‘Io ti darò di più’, ‘La musica è finita’, ‘Casa bianca’, ‘Mi sono innamorata di te’, ‘Sadness’, ‘Un’ora sola ti vorrei’, ‘Una ragione di più’, ‘Eternità’. And we arrive at the Seventies and his two most iconic songs and also with the most resounding and lasting success: ‘L’appuntamento’ and ‘Domani è un altro giorno’. His career continues with other songs that leave a mark on Italian music: ‘Dettagli’, ‘E così per non morire’, ‘Sto male’. In 1976 he founded his own record company, ‘Vanilla’ – after having recorded albums first for Ricordi and then for Ariston – and his debut was with ‘La voglia di sognare’, to continue with the album born from the collaboration with two totems of Brazilian music, namely Vinicius de Moraes and Toquinho, namely ‘La voglia, la pazzia, l’incoscienza, l’allegria’. In the Eighties for Cgd he released ‘Ricetta di donna’, ‘Musica musica’, ‘Vai Valentina’, ‘Uomini’; while the return with Gino Paoli in concert is marked by ‘Ti lascio una canzone’. The songs ‘Stella nascente’ and ‘Perduto’ produced by Mario Lavezzi date back to the early nineties, with the album going gold for sales. In a jazz key is the collaboration with Paolo Fresu for ‘Argilla’. After some revisitation albums, from Burt Bacharach to Italian pop groups, in 2008 she allows herself a luxury self-celebration, for the 50 years of career, with ‘Più di me’ with duets for her successes with Claudio Baglioni, Fiorella Mannoia, Jovanotti, Carmen Consoli, the Pooh, Lucio Dalla, Gianni Morandi, Eros Ramazzotti and the ‘stellar’ one with Mina, with the two recognized divas of Italian song duetting in ‘Amiche mai’. But it doesn’t end there: Vanoni returns to the Sanremo Festival with ‘Imparare ad amarsi’ and also receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Italian song festival, the first artist to do so. Inexhaustible, in 2020 she released a new album of unreleased songs with Bmg, including among others ‘Un sorriso in mezzo al pianto’, with a title that couldn’t be more explicit and at the same time more appropriate: ‘Unica’. In 2021 she was the guest of honor at the 71st Sanremo Festival, where she performed a medley of her greatest hits and ‘Un sorriso dentro al pianto’ accompanied on the piano by Francesco Gabbani. In the summer of 2021 the ironic and refined summer hit ‘Toy Boy’ was released, with Colapesce and Dimartino, whose video clip was directed by Luca Guadagnino. In 2023 she returned as a guest at the 73rd Sanremo Festival. In the meantime, Ornella Vanoni, thanks also to Virginia Raffaele’s imitations, is regaining popularity thanks to her self-irony that she puts into each of her television performances, so much so that she has earned her own space as a guest on Fabio Fazio’s program ‘Che tempo che fa’, first on Raitre and then on Nove, where she has Mara Maionchi as her sidekick. At the end of the successful Rai musical series, ‘Senza Rete’, in the 70s Ornella ‘Finisce qui’… But Ornella’s voice never seems to fade: it’s ‘Senza fine’. So for her 90th birthday she has given herself a new album, ‘Diverse’, to be released on October 18. The album will contain a new version of some of her greatest hits recorded specifically for the occasion: among the tracks is also ‘Ti voglio’ from 1977 which is now revived in a new version sung together with Elodie and Ditonellapiaga. —[email protected] (Web Info)