artist
artist
Roberto De Simone

Roberto De Simone (Naples, 25 August 1933) is an Italian theater director, composer and musicologist.
He began studying piano at the age of six. And he is immediately indicated as one of the most deserving students of Italian conservatories.
In 1957 he began a concert career which alternated with research on the popular expressiveness of Campania and with a collateral activity as a composer and musicologist.
In 1967 the meeting with a group of young people interested in a new proposal of popular music, Giovanni Mauriello, Eugenio Bennato and Carlo d'Angiò - later Peppe Barra, Patrizio Trampetti, Fausta Vetere and Corrado Sfogli - determined the birth of the Nuova Compagnia Di Canto Popolare, of which he became the animator, researcher and creator of musical materials.
A new way of doing theater and of conceiving and proposing popular music.
His first objective is the recovery and re-proposal of the cultural, theatrical and musical heritage of the popular oral and written Campania tradition. The popular repertoire is not reproduced in an arbitrary manner, but based on cultured systems such as writing and metric elaboration. Work of this kind involves real "field" research; in fact, De Simone and the members of the group go to investigate during popular festivals, to collect interviews in the villages of the Campania hinterland, to find traces where tradition has already been lost.
At the same time, attention is also paid to documents of cultured tradition: library material, articles, but also essays on past forms that are absolutely necessary for the recovery and updating of traditional music from the Campania area.
In 1976 "La Gatta Cenerentola" was born, an opera written and set to music by De Simone himself which will determine the real success, from which the "II° Coro delle Lavandaie" is taken.

Roberto De Simone on Discogs.