Giorgia Fumanti ~ Her voice carries her from here to Texas

EtternaFanSylvie · Joined: Jan 23, 2006 Posts: 44

Italian head-turner from Ste. Anne des Lacs to belt out O Canada at NHL All-Star Game

Giorgia Fumanti was waiting for a flight to Dallas, where tomorrow she will have her first hockey experience. She has a good seat for the NHL All-Star Game. She is singing the national anthem.
"It's pretty special," the raven-haired songbird said in a departure-level lounge at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport. "I was saying to myself, and to God, that I wanted to sing for millions of hearts. And there are millions of hearts that will hear."
It is reasonable to surmise that the telecast of O Canada will increase by a hundredfold or more the number of hearts who have heard this resident of the Laurentian town of Ste. Anne des Lacs, who spoke neither English nor French when she arrived from Italy three years ago at 27 (she is now proficient in both ).
She came to Quebec in part because she had found a manager, crossover-minded Maurice Velenosi, who understood her artistic needs. "I kept meeting all these producers who wanted to do music for commercial, for sexy, for money," she recalled. "My answer was no. If you want to do music with me, you have to respect music, and respect me."
By all accounts Fumanti does not need a great deal of promotion to prick up ears and turn heads. She was in Miami in November to record Heavenly Voices, a PBS special (expect it to air in March, around the time of the launch of her CD, From My Heart). An agent working for Jose Carreras, there to check out one of the other singers, signed up Fumanti instead.
She sang with the tenor in Christmas concerts in Seoul and Hong Kong, meeting him for a warmup only two hours before the first gig. To her horror, after a 13-hour flight, she discovered that the program would be given in a concert hall, classical-style, with no microphones.
"I did all my meditation and all my prayers," she remembered. "His voice and my voice, they heard from the back of the balcony." Included in tour repertoire was Libiamo, the drinking song from Verdi's La Traviata.
Fumanti is better equipped than most singers to straddle genres. Born in the Tuscan town of Aulla to owners of an electronics store, she gave no thought to singing before joining her church choir at 17. Even this gesture was connected to a group assisting handicapped children (a personal interest).
"And that night a natural soprano voice came out," she said. "It was a big surprise for everybody."
After three years of what she calls "natural singing," she began studying law in Parma and taking music lessons at the city's well-regarded conservatory. "The problem was that it was only classical," she said of the regime. "I was in love with melody. I was not in love with opera."
At around age 23, Fumanti began to study yoga and expand her religious consciousness to include other cultures. "I asked myself what I wanted to do: 'Why am I here, what does my soul want to do in this lifetime?"
Law was not the answer, and a bad experience with a voice teacher in Parma soured her on classical training. The problem was that pop music as narrowly defined seemed too easy and commercial. So she moved toward the hybrid popular style embodied by the film composer Ennio Morricone, the tenor Andrea Bocelli or, a step closer to pop, the music of Sting and Vangelis. It was the influential Italian rocker Zucchero who alerted Velenosi to Fumanti as a potential client.

After gaining a little local exposure in a concert with Nanette Workman at St. Joseph's Oratory, Fumanti worked with the Montreal teacher Lucette Tremblay. More recently she has consulted with the New York teacher William Riley, who gave her an one-hour tutorial on O Canada.
Thrust into the position of representing her adopted nation at a celebration of its national pastime, Fumanti decided not to listen to other solo performances of the anthem, although she has heard instrumental and choral versions. "I don't want to study too much," the soprano said. "I don't want to take away the passion and emotion of the moment."
She confesses that her presence in Quebec (as a permanent resident) has something to do with the man she lives with, a special fellow, although details were not forthcoming. (Involved in music? "Maybe," Fumanti smiled.) But the Italian is attracted also by Montreal's storied cosmopolitan atmosphere and its mix of European and North American influences.
Of course, in Dallas, she will sing O Canada in both languages. And of course, it will be an a cappella experience, with no backup other than a microphone.
"I'm sure the players will be great," she said about tomorrow. "The best players are there. They will play with their passion. I will play with my passion."

Source:
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/arts/story.html?id=d182988d-b307-4701-8e2e-48206754b369&p=2