- country:Italy
- style(s):Classical
- label:not signed
- type:Band
- instrumentation:vocal
- artist posted by:F & B Promotion
Line up
- Cristina Coltelli (vocals)
- Fabrizio Milani (piano)
- Sergio Chiti (accordeon)
“When Edith Giovanna Gassion makes her debut in 1935 the phonograph is still a rare object that almost nobody can afford. The singers are nothing more than freak performers using the sidewalks as a stage. But when the great Edith Piaf dies, in 1963, music has turned into show business, the “image” of the artists has become more important than the songs they sing and the world has deeply changed. Edith walked through all these transformations influencing almost 30 years of cultural and musical history and she is still remembered by a always renewed audience as ``the voice that was able to sing the whole sorrow of the world´´”
The idea of a show with Edith Piaf’s songs was born in 1999 during the exhibitions for Bologna 2000, capital of European Culture. In the beginning it had to be a performance for actors and singers painting the special atmospheres of the old Paris passing from the 19th to the 20th century.
Going on with the performances and experimenting the show with the audience, the contents of the show radically changed: the set design disappeared, and so did the actors’ monologues and the actors themselves. On stage only remained a piano and an accordion, with the most immortal Edith’s songs and stories.
Nowadays, Edith Piaf imposed herself again with her melodies, her personal atmospheres, deleting all that is superfluous and pointless, to sing, once again, real stories that hit the heart and the stomach, into the simplicity of a performance in close contact with the audience.
Piaf’s songs snake throughout the narration of her suffered, uneasy life fully dedicated to sing universal feelings like love, death, the necessity of selling herself, the fear of living. The life of a woman who fully lived everything that came on her way, between joys and sorrows, and who gave to her audience not just songs but proper hymns, quite simple but incredibly powerful sometimes, funny and grotesque some other.
Rue Pigalle is an elegant music recital that leads the audience into a trip throughout memories, giving as well some surprises like less known cabaret songs that paint a smiling and mocking Edith Piaf against all the sorrows that life gave to her. It’s an always up-to-date walkthrough, struggling, funny, harrowing and going off the deep end of the soul. Just like LIFE should always be.