Il Bacio - Rise and Fall of Salomè marks the return to the collaboration of singer and songwriter Monica Pinto with the musician and producer Salvio Vassallo. After years of working together in the neapolitan band Spaccanapoli, of which Monica Pinto was co-founder and lead vocalist, they are now producing a record project in which elements of traditional music from Campania are fused with a more contemporary musical language, thus maintaining continuity with the original band. However, in this work, all the tracks are original and the traditional element, which is also enriched with hints of ancient music, is combined with the use of singular electronic sounds and constructed and manipulated sound timbres, even from acoustic sounds.
The production, realised by Salvio Vassallo, follows in the wake of his previous projects in which he reworked on Luciano Berio, Claudio Monteverdi 'pieces but also some others from the Campania region's traditional repertoire.
Il bacio is Salvio Vassallo's brainchild. Starting from the strong suggestion that the composer Richard Strauss's Salomè has exerted on him, Vassallo proposes to Monica Pinto to realise a project that recounts the figure of Salomè in a Neapolitan transposition, recovering the experience of the group Spaccanapoli and involving some of the musicians who have been part of the Neapolitan band over the years.
Monica Pinto, who collaborated on the composition of some of the melody lines, wrote the lyrics for almost all the songs, starting with Oscar Wilde's Salomè, the 1891 one-act play. The poetic language and strong evocative power of the work were a profound inspiration for his writing.
The pieces which are mainly in neapolitan, lend themselves so greatly to restoring that specific dimension of passion, sensuality and eroticism so masterfully depicted in Wilde's play, they flow smoothly through the events of the protagonist and reconstruct her story.
The idea of declining this work towards a neapolitan scenario is generated from the conflicts and contradictions that portray the character of Salomè. One could spot a consonance between Naples and the Wildian protagonista, where, if Salomè represents an eternal symbol of love and death, an archetype of beauty that seduces and deceives and even kills, the same way , in Pinto and Vassallo's immagination ,Naples is a mesmerising place where opposites coexist, a place of contrasts, where the boundaries between good and evil are blurred and beauty coexists with monstrosity, dichotomies that also recall the controversial figure of the siren, to whom legend attributes the birth of the Neapolitan city. The sacred-profane dualism that is imbued throughout traditional neapolitan culture is also echoed in the story of Salomè, who constantly moves from innocence to guilt, purity and perversion.
This project is enriched by an inestimable and precious collaboration: the one of Marcello Colasurdo, an important figure in the panorama of traditional Campania music, also part of the Spaccanapoli collective, unfortunately prematurely deceased in July 2023. Although placed in an unusual musical context for his artistic career, in Il Bacio, Marcello fits perfectly into the story, becoming the narrator's voice in the background.
With his participation in this disc, Marcello leaves us the last testimony of his art, an absolutely invaluable art, a journey immensely rich in musical, theatrical and cinematographic experiences.