Press Release

Articles, Interviews, Reviews

La Sicilia EVENTS Spring & Easter 2003 
The power of women
By Gianni Nicola Caracoglia

In Far lunari, Cecilia Pitino, with the collaboration of 
Dounia, gives world music a new emotional flavour. Stop 
believing in what you see, and start to believe in what 
you 
dream - thats the opinion of Dario Fo, who has realised so 
many dreams; not least that of winning a Nobel Literature 
prize thanks to a non official language, gramelot. Dreams 
and the moon have always been a stable couple, and Cecilia 
Pitinos music journeys along the imaginary line that links
two worlds that are poles apart but nonetheless real: her 
Far Lunari (a record that came out in March with World 
Music and is now on sale too), traces the story of an 
entirely Sicilian emotion, and locates it in its ideal 
niche of the greater Meditteranean that embraces the latin 
and islamic worlds.

The collaboration with Dounia, the Siculo-Palestinian 
group 
(among the major exponents of world music made in Sicily), 
who wrote the music, is not just a question of chance. 
Similarly, the collaboration with the Catanian writer Sal 
Costa, for the lyrics that the versatile Cecilia has 
adapted to her rounder and softer Modican accent, was 
equally deliberate.
Far lunari is also an entrepreneurial experiment for 
Cecilia Pitino, since it announces the debut of the MM&B, 
management company and record label that are the fruits of 
the close symbiosis between Cecilia Pitino and Maria 
Margarone. 

A strictly femminine duo, that demonstrates how the power 
of women has no need of violence to find expression, even 
more so when that power is wielded by an artist whose 
communicative weapons are those of instinct and passion. 
Cecilia Pitino, singer and dancer, true Sicilian by 
profession, has never lacked in expressive power. Female 
power is a force that is sleeping and that we need to 
awaken comments the Modican artist. How? By means of 
sentiments and sonorities that are linked together,
feelings for ones children, for the man in ones life, for 
ones friends.
In that sense I like to develop a relationship with my 
public.

The stories described in the songs sung by Cecilia Pitino, 
even if they were written by men, reveal a way of feeling 
that is wholly female, thanks to the interpretation. This 
is a record that unites male and female. Its an unusual 
form of communication. One of the fundamental things for 
me 
is that certain vibrations, above all, I have to feel,
otherwise I would not be able to pass them on to others.

For Far Lunari, Cecilia Pitino has studied a new approach 
compared with that on Spunta na Rosa (1998). The love for 
Portuguese fado is a common strand, that emerges in the 
way 
that the Sicilian tongue and its accents are used. With 
Far 
Lunari I have touched tonalities that I have never 
expressed before  confesses Cecilia Pitino  I had to 
overcome barriers never encountered before, and I wont 
hide 
the fact that there was a certain amount of fear involved.

Caption
(Timeless music: there is past and present in Far Lunari, 
there is tradition, but also the necessity to create a 
contemporary, original Sicilian music. Of the ten pieces 
on 
the record, seven are original, three are versions of 
traditional songs, among which a minimal version of Mi 
votu 
e mi rivotu is worthy of note. Cecilia Pitino, accompanied 
for the occasion by Dounia, will play in Catania on 24 
April at Scenario Pub.bli.co, in the finale of the Meltin 
Folk concert.]

www.freakout-online.com
by Massimiliano Zambetta

CECILIA PITINO  Far Lunari (MM&B)

A great reason to go and by number 59 of the magazine 
World 
Music as soon as possibile is the fact that they give you 
the record of Cecilia Pitino with it. 

Despite the fact that Cecilia sings her songs in Sicilian, 
and that there are two traditional pieces, this work is as 
far removed from the idea of folklore as one could 
imagine. 
Its a real album, deeply rooted in the earth that we walk 
on, but of far-reaching vision, able to communicate beyond 
the language barrier. In the same way that in the records 
of
Calexico it is easy to imagine the sand in that no-mans 
and 
between California and Mexico, and in that of Sigur Ros 
the 
sulphurous air of the island; in Far Lunari there is lavic 
rock and sun-baked earth.

Behind the voice of Cecilia Pitino, there are Dounia 
(their 
CD distributed by Manifesto is worth hearing), who, with 
an 
acoustic guitar, percussion and double-bass now pulsating, 
now played with a bow, and with a male arab voice singing 
counterpoint, trace musical arabesques of great delicacy 
and restraint; not one note too many nor one too few.

IL TEMPO 16 April 03
The dialect of Cecilia Pitino at Palma
A sea of notes round Sicily
by Fabrizio Finamore

The mediterranean musical atmosphere, and in particular 
the 
sonorities of the Sicilian tradition will be on stage 
tomorrow ( Thursday 17 April ), on the stage of La Palma 
Rome, in the concert of Cecilia Pitino. A Sicilian artist 
who has worked for years to rediscover and re-elaborate
the cultural traditions of her region, Pitino will present 
her original repertoire to the Roman public, in songs 
where 
the languages, sonorities and traditions of the 
Mediterranean confront, and are influenced by the rhythms 
of our day.

How difficult is it, at the dawn of the third milennium, 
to 
express oneself, to communicate in dialect? Very, since 
the 
language has changed with the years; its always more 
difficult to express the concepts and emotions that we 
feel 
today in the dialect of the past. 

Yet one of your artistic goals seems to be just that.

Its true, I try, I try above all to make the traditions of 
the past intelligible to the generations of today

Is that true of the music as well? Is the fact that you do 
shows outside Sicily a complication?

Also in her Rome concert she will be accompanied by 
Dounia, 
a group of Sicilian/Palestinian musicians with whom she 
has 
collaborated for some time.

GIORNALE DI SICILIA 26 Aprile 03
Cecilia Pitino, notes suspended between Sicily and 
Palestine, by Orazio Longo

Sober and Sicilian. An authentic Sicilian. Cecilia Pitino 
and Far Lunari: contemporary notes, suspended between 
Sicily and Palestine.

The new record by Cecilia Pitino has come out on Scenario 
Pub.Bli.co. An absolute premier for Far Lunari, a musical 
and cultural project that also involves Dounia led by 
Faisal Taher, who arranged all ten musical tracks
of the green-covered CD (executive production by MM&B of 
Maria Margarone). A one hour concert, last Thursday in the 
concert hall in via Teatro Massimo, for the last number of 
the Celtic World, festival of acoustic and folk music, 
with 
Cecilia Pitino, in leather trousers and bronze-coloured 
shoulder-length hair, in great form, interpreting live
all the songs of the record, from  Canzuni da notti ca 
veni 
to Nami, the traditional Mi votu e mi rivotu, Cudieddu e 
mola  and A cursa

Far Lunari is contemporary Sicilian music, with seven new 
songs and three re-workings: globalisation does not 
distort 
the individual cultures. Far Lunari confirms the talent of 
the Palestinian vocalist Faisal Taher  it is the 
birthchild 
of the happy collaboration of Cecilia with Dounia...
With the lyrics of Sal Costa and the music of Vincenzo 
Gangi (guitar) and Giovanni Arena (double bass), Riccardo 
Gerbino on percussion; Far Lunari was presented to the 
public with a very basic set, composed only of musical 
instruments and well-orchestrated lights.

At the end, two encores for the public, but above all, the 
desire for happiness  as the singer herself explained  in 
the song E campu cuntenta.

RUMORE June 2003
Ascolti > box > world
by Gianluca Runza

Sanguine is the adjective that most suits the voice of the 
Sicilian Cecilia Pitino: Far Lunari, her second album, 
renews her collaboration with Dounia, who play, produce 
and 
arrange, backing Pitinos voice with their minimal acoustic 
dressing, devoid of any decoration except their capacity 
to 
inspire imagination. 

Single note the monochord cutting. 

FOLK BULLETIN 194 luglio 2003
FAR LUNARI
Cecilia Pitino
MM&B MC017, 2003

CONTEMPORARY FOLK/SICILY
By Luca Ferrari

The four minutes of her Mi votu e mi rivotu would be 
enough 
to set Cecilia Pitino among the best interpreters of 
popular music today in Italy, if it were not that Far 
Lunari, her debut album, free with number 30 of World 
Music 
is many other things, and much more. Other things, because 
the coordinates on which her music, mostly original 
compositions, is charted, are only at a tangent to the 
idea 
of popular and traditional, drawing on timbric and melodic 
forms and ideas of disparate origin (ethnic, jazz, 
minimalism, contemporary classical...); more, because 
Cecilia Pitino triumphs not simply as an exceptional 
interpreter of songs in dialect (all the texts are in fact 
sung in Sicilian), but as the fascinating muse of the 
project, carried out with the determining aid of the fine 
group Dounia, certainly among the most convincing of the 
latest generation of technic groups (after New World of 
2002, they confirm their promise with their recent work 
Moncef Ghachem, book-CD that overflows with poetry).

This is an album among the most beautiuful I have heard in 
the first part of this year; coherent, dense with ideas, 
rich in lyrics of rare poetry (nearly all signed by Sal 
Costa and Faisal Taher, Far Lunari courageously asserts a 
position that is light years away from the by now 
customary,
seemingly obligatory Mediterranean style, the kitsch way 
of 
combining sounds in the name of a specific, artificial and 
rhetorical idea of ethnic music in the south of Europe,  
cooked up in a test tube for the pleasure of the Market. 
We 
find an intense and authentic interpretation of the lyrics 
(as in the traditional Abbobbò, a lullaby based on a 
subtle
arpeggio played by the guitar, harmonised by an evocative 
double bass in minor, or in Nami, a dance sung in arabic), 
refined in the executive and vocal practise (the voice of 
Taher, by now an established presence in Italian ethnic 
music, is really extraordinary). The album of Cecilia
Pitino is a touching post modern version of contemporary 
folk, pleasant like all music can be when it plays no 
cheap 
tricks, but instead follows, in passionate rapture, the 
twists and turns of the soul (U jocu)