This Wednesday, January 10, in Madrid, Christina Rosenvinge presents her new project, as interesting as ever, ‘The Sapphic Verses’. As part of Inverfest, you can see it at The Music Station (tickets here) from 8:30 p.m.
Inspired by Sappho’s work from a play, and with productions so varied that they range from chamber pop to techno, the idea of these compositions is to return to the author the musical character that she once lost. In that sense, ‘Light as air’ is the best expression. It’s our “Song of the Day” after ‘Poem of Passion’ already passed through this section as a preview single a couple of months ago.
The delicacy that we already perceived in the author when dealing with mythology in ‘Canción del Echo’ is now maintained in this song about a game. Rosenvinge speaks with devotion and gratitude in a vocative, something common in Sappho (“You, light as air (…) you, radiant and delicate”), although the threat of the end looms over her: “The hour is approaching, soon we will have “I have to leave, you will have to teach me how to live without you.”
Inspiration or the lack thereof is a theme throughout the album, and it also appears in this song with just piano, voice and effects very much in the background (“You, who taught me to speak with the divine muses, who now They are like my sisters (…) you will have to teach me how to live without you »). It seems like a metaphor not without humor, for an artist who – let’s remember – has not released a studio album for 6 years.
Rosenvinge, who was inspired by Rufus Wainwright’s album on Shakespearean sonnets, has had more creative freedom than this, taking in some songs only fragments or semantic fields from Sappho’s work. The chorus is entirely his, as he has explained in El Giradiscos, although he has adapted expressions from Sappho and, as we said, the idea of dialogue.
As she said in the same interview, the idea of the album is for everyone to enjoy it, not just those who follow Sappho for her work as a woman or the value of her work being aimed at women, and this intimate song that Rosenvinge has come to be classified as “sexy”, it is the best way. Perhaps another flower between the path.
