Flipmagazine Meeting Anuna ( part 2 )

Meeting Anuna ( part 2 )

Set 03, 2010 Attualità, World Wide

We now see them rehearsing in Dublin, dressed in every day clothes and under Michael’s watchful supervision; the landscape then changes, Anuna get into their true identity, and here they are dressed in beautiful old-fashioned clothes and cloaks, singing in theatres and concert halls all around the world. The singers have a soberly proud attitude, and with the most elegant manners they stand, serene as only true professionals can be, before audiences of all kinds, both for culture and nationality. No director stands in the way between the two sides of the stage: voices and atmospheres, as created, arrive complete and without obstacles directly to the ears and minds of those listening, who bewitched by the sharp looks of the singers ask for nothing but to keep receiving those magnetic waves of emotions. “I think that very much had a lot to do with it” we are told by Michael McGlynn, who, with great courtesy, answers our questions on his work “the relation between the audience and the performer would have been key to my decision to pursue choral music as a livelihood.”. This peculiarity, which can be true for choral music in general, is even more true in the exceptional case of Anuna: their repertoire, when not of Michael McGlynn’s original compositions, often based on lyrics from ancient poems, consists of re-arranged versions of ancient songs – the listener (and even more the audience) perceives an enormously evocative atmosphere, created by musics in which melodies are mixed with a skilfull use of modality, and also by the group’s attitude that we partially described before, and which is not just a mere support but a fundamental part of the dimension which the audience is gently brought into.

The journey begins in 1987, when a very young Michael creates the first embodiment of what will later become Anuna (yet, untill 1991 the name will be An Uaithne), with the purpose, among others, to create a bridge between ancient and modern music, through the instrument of organized voices singing in choir – this is the dimension in which Michael states to have back in time found what he was looking for, something that would open his “mind and ears”, both as a musician, generally speaking, and also as a composer. It doesn’t take too long before Michael is joined in the group by his twin brother John: a singer and a composer as well, even though with a distinguished sensitivity of his own. “I joined because I loved the music” says John, who beside vocal skills also features remarkable ones as a guitar player: in fact, he’s behind many of the arrangements for this instrument played along with Michael’s compositions. John, beside pursuing his own career as a songwriter, still contributes to the work of Anuna – he also makes no mistery of his role “Michael tells me that we are doing a version of a traditional song, so I source the original version and then do a simple arrangement of it. It’s that straightforward!”. And the results are not lacking. In 1994 Anuna join the cast of the show “Riverdance”, a worldwide success which most certainly gives a boost to their long and already launched career – you can hardly count the number of the first class collaborations featured in the history of the group, and to give you a clue we just have to name artists such as Elvis Costello, Sting, Sinead O’Connor and Michael Crawford.

Enrico De Zottis

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