Album Notes

(R)esistere is a concept-album, in that all the songs were conceived and written with a common draft: the continuum between private and public within the life of a person. The unity between the intimate, the interpersonal and the social dimensions creates a canvas where introspective (“L’album”, “Sotto due cuscini”…), relationship (“Carillon”, “Non lasciarmi andare via”…) and socially-committed (“Resistere”, “Kimeo e Kasui”…) songs depict the thoughts and the actions of a single person. Not by chance, the songs that open and close the album (if we exlcude the two fragments that frame the entire work), i.e. “Fa-Si” and “Invecchia con me”, are songs that precisely refer to the continuity between provate and public.
Playing with words, one might say that this album is ego-de-centric.

Anna Maria Castelli, singer.
Castelli is a recording artist who started her carreer as a jazz singer. She has recorded four successful CDs, including “Something to remember”, the first non-classical superaudio CD distributed in Italy. In 2002 she performed in Lithuania with the Lithuanian State Simphony Orchestra a Léo Ferré Opera, “Opéra du Pauvre”. She took part in the Festival of the Mediterranean Peoples in Bisceglie (Italy) with her performance “The night of dream Goddesses” which awarded her the Portovenere Woman Prize in 2002 as the best female project. She won the Europe Music Prize in August 2002 with “Opera Tango”, accompanied by the Uruguayan bandoneonist H.U. Passarella and his quartet. Her love for tango produced another precious collaboration, with Academy Award-winner composer Luis Bacalov, focused on Carlos Gardel’s tangos.
Such eclectic artistic background is one of the main driving forces of her first pop album, (R)esistere, which indeed, while clearly talking the language of authorial-yet-mainstream pop,winks to a wide catalogue of styles, including the familiar (for Castelli) jazz, bossa nova and swing.
Castelli has toured all over the world: her last performance in Vilnius was enthusiastically witnessed by a sold-out Congress Hall.

Dario Martinelli, author of the songs:
Dario Martinelli is Associate Professor of Musicology and Semiotics at Helsinki University. His academic activity is coupled with his work as a musical composer between the opposite poles of avantgarde experimental music and authorial pop. In the former field, he has successfully written and performed, alone or with fellow musicians (including Petri Kuljuntausta), for such contexts like the Avant-Garde Music Festival "Eclectica" (Tartu, Estonia), and the 'New Music Academy Concert VII' (Sibelius Academy, Helsinki). As a songwriter, he wrote and co-arranged the entire album (R)esistere, attempting the challenging task of writing music that is at the same time catchy but not banal.
In 2006 he was knighted by the President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano for his contribution to Italian culture, art and research in Finland.