Catalani meets Morricone

La Wally is an opera in four acts by composer Alfredo Catalani. I discovered the Aria of the La Wally, like some of you classical music lovers, in the french movie “Diva” in 1981 . Even though the interpretation in that movie by Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez was fabulous I always found that the tempo was too fast, which is due to the long notes that eventually would get the signer out of breath if the tempo was too slow. Some composer used some smart trick for extremely long woods or brass notes (and I am not referring to P.D.Q.Bach ;o) by having half of the wood (or brass) section to alternate between the notes and crossfade for a single extremely long one. That strategy would imply having twin signers with exactly the same voice alternating the melodic line. Unfortunately, classical music is made of traditions and thus traditions means you don’t do that kind of thing. Moreover, finding twin divas these days isn’t really feasible. Nevertheless, from what I recall of the Aria, since I do not have the score, I made this reduced chamber strings version to highlight the wonderful chord changes made by Alfredo Catalani and giving it a mood like Ennio Merricone did in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Enjoy the sacrilege and profanity,

Cheers

https://soundcloud.com/user-461764443/catalani-meets-morricone