Etta Scollo
Voice
Etta Scollo
Italy/Germany
Etta Scollo is a singer and a songwriter.
Born in Catania, Sicily, she lives between Sicily and Berlin.
Child of musicians she began to work with music when she was very young. She cultivated her passion first in private, writing songs and performing in Turin as soloist or with local groups and than becoming more and more engaged with her music.
In 1983 she won the 1st prize at “Diano Marina Jazz Festival” which was directed by the jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini. She moved to Vienna where she studied singing at the Conservatory. Her interest in blues and jazz took her to some collaborations with artists like Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Sunnyland Slim e Champion Jack Dupree. During those years she record a very successful Italian cover of the Beatles’ “Oh darling”.
During the 90s she moved to Hamburg, where she composed the album “Blu” which is recorded with the London Session Orchestra directed by Will Malone and some soundtracks for several movies like the song “I tuoi fiori” for the movie Bad Guy directed by the south corean Kin-Ki-Duk. She recorded the two albums “il bianco del tempo” and “casa”.
She won “Premio Pino Veneziano 2005”, the “Weltmusikpreis Ruth 2007” and the “Premio Rosa Balisteri-Alberto Favara VIII 2008” for Canra Ro’, a CD/DVD of her performances of a collection of songs dedicated to the Sicilian folk singer Rosa Balistreri.
From this moment she became to work on traditional music and on musical composition based on written works and she produced Canta Ro’ in Trio and Les Siciliens, a collection of music based on historical texts and poems from different ages.
In 2007 she took part in the recital “La mia vita vorrei scriverla cantando” and she composed the poetical-musical project Il fiore splendente, an homage to the Arab-Sicilian poets o the IX-XII Centuries, in collaboration with artists as Franco Battiato, Giovanni Sollima, Markus Stockhausen.
She acted as Elena in a musical performance of the Faust II by J.W Goethe and in 2010 she acted as Alice in “Alice in the wonderland” at Teatro Massimo in Palermo.
She rework Giuseppe Verdi’s music for a modern performance if “il Rigoletto” at the Neukoellner Oper in Berlino.
In 2011 she published the album Cuoresenza, a monologue about love in all its aspects and she wrote the music for Vincenzo Consolo’s fable “Lunaria”.
Tempo al Tempo is the most essential and experimental of her works and it’s written and created together with the cellist Susanne Paul in 2015.
In 2016 the writer Paolo di Stefano asked her to callaborate to musical performance of his book “La catastròfa”. In 2017 Etta Scollo elaborate a new intimate project , il passo interiore which is a musical work based on a collection of poems from different cultures and a thought on social and human themes of the last two centuries. In 2018 she performed for the first time as soloist at the Berlin. She produced a performance of The Soldier’s Tale by Igor Stravinsky.
In October 2020 she will publish the book “Voci di Sicilia”.
<< I find that the beauty of the project lies in the diversity and authenticity of the individuals who together form a moving chorus between moments of light and dark that surround all of us at the moment.
Personally, I wanted to leave space and silence. In my performance I kept listening, following the flow of the mantra inwardly.
Since corona appeared in our lives, I have felt this strong need to listen, to “melt”, if we can say so, in the totality of the shocking event.>>
