Valvona & Crolla is a bit of a household name in Edinburgh, and that’s putting it mildly. When your shop is found within Jenner’s Department Store, it’s safe to assume that Edinburgh’s movers and shakers have taken the place to heart. So the preview for ‘Neapolitan Songs’, located within the store’s small theatre on Leith Walk, was almost fully packed. Old posters of Southern Italian towns, Pozzuoli, Sorrento and, of course, Naples, decorated the area. So it was no surprise that Philip Contini’s songs about Naples reached back into his families’ past and left his audience calling for more.
Over 70 minutes Contini performed a wide variety of Neapolitan songs, loosely structured with stories about his father, Carlo. Most of these songs and stories involved girls in some form: hugs, kisses, and, most surprisingly, sleepwalking. Contini excelled at bringing home the cheekiness and impudence of the songs and stories, his tone always capturing the mood. Extensive hand gestures and dodgy dad-at-a-wedding dancing help in no small way to translate the Italian. If you don’t speak it, don’t worry, there’s a small introduction before each song (though the steamier parts are left out). If the excess of romantic songs meant Contini began to err on the side of bawdiness, his charm managed to keep things from descending into pantomime. In particular ‘Chella, là’ (roughly translated as ‘her, over there’) with its peppy chorus was a delight. However, I thought the slower songs, while perfectly passable, did not have this same edge to them. Here Contini relied a little too much on imploring gestures but his voice still managed to run the emotional gamut.
A word must go out to the excellent Dick Lee, whose irreverent clarinet and sprightly arrangements provided consistently appropriate backing to the singing. The backing performers showed great musicianship and were never off the ball, even when Contini tried to catch them off guard at the end with a raucous tarantella about where babies come from (sugar and roses, apparently). A performance certainly worth seeing if you want to catch a nostalgic slice of Italy from a group that are utterly sure of their own abilities.
