"Sofa is delighted to announce the Italian musician and composer Andrea Giordano (b. 1995)’s Àlea, a suite for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Dedicated to Giordano’s friend and mentor, the Italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandra Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020, Àlea is at once a lament and testament to Giordano’s multifarious musicianship. In dense, rending orchestration, the artist shows us the multidimensionality of grief, then a way to swim through it.
Àlea dates from the start of Giordano’s master’s degree at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, where, after discussions with her professor Sidsel Endresen, Giordano began to develop songs towards an album of ensemble music that would allow her to come to terms with Giachero’s passing. She then decided upon the ensemble’s constituents, aiming for a mix of instruments with similar sounds and timbres that could blend seamlessly.
As Giordano describes, the tracks, recorded separately at the Norwegian Academy of Music in 2022 and assembled later, are like separate rooms (“stansias”) within the same house, each an individual expression of tension, repetition, and ceremony. We begin with an ominous percussion-backed chorale introducing a pensive duo lament for harp and voice, which evaporates into upward scales. A piercing cyclical motive for flutes grows into a flailing organ chorale, atop which Giordano sings a second text as a keening lament. The last section is sparse and enigmatic, riddled with small bumps of activity that finally wilt away.
Critical to the project was Giordano’s ongoing research, from 2018, into a dialect of Piedmontese—a Gallo-Romance language spoken primarily in Piedmont, in northwest Italy—that is endemic to her native city of Cuneo. Giordano had previously sung librettos of poetry in the predominant Piedmontese dialect, a process she describes as “an attempt to be honest with my roots.” For Àlea, she sought an even more personal approach, hoping to convey the Piedmontese she’d grown up speaking with her grandmother. She commissioned Vieri Cervelli Montel, a composer and friend of both Giordano and Giachero, to write two imagetic texts in Italian that she and Montel then translated together into her hometown dialect based on her interviews with scholars and family.
The album’s title has tripartite origins: it is a reference to the Italian for “to Alessandro” (“à Ale” tweaked as “Àlea”) a nod to the aleatoric nature of his death, and an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, chosen to express Giachero’s wisdom reverberating through future generations—of which Àlea is clear evidence." - Jennifer Gersten
