The story
A composed song
«Entorno al fòch» sounds like a folk song, but it isn’t one. Words and tune are by Mansueto Pedrotti, a Trentino man who lived from 1873 to 1926. Written in Trentino dialect, it portrays a world its author knew well: family life in mountain homes at the turn of the twentieth century.
Round the hearth
The scene is an ordinary evening by the hearth: the bench drawn up to the fire, the pyramid-shaped hood black with soot, soup simmering in the pot. Someone talks, someone remembers the living and the dead, someone sings, someone sits quietly watching the flames. Between the verses comes a refrain about the soup that is never quite ready — a smile amid the nostalgia. It is a portrait of a family of modest means, though hardly poor: there is wine on the table, after all.
Mountain reserve
The song speaks of deep affection without ever spelling it out. The Coro della SAT’s programme notes describe it as the expression of a long-held attachment to family memories, tucked away behind the plain-spoken realism of mountain people. The feeling stays beneath the surface and only breaks through in the third verse, where a modulation changes the whole colour of the piece.
The pianist and the choir
The song owes its definitive form to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, from Brescia, one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. He first met the Pedrotti brothers and their choir in 1936, at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. In 1949 he took up a post at the Bolzano Conservatoire; Enrico Pedrotti, one of the choir’s founders, lived in the city, and the two became friends. From 1954 Michelangeli arranged nineteen songs for the Coro della SAT — the only composing he ever put his name to in a career otherwise devoted entirely to performing. «Entorno al fòch» belongs to the arrangements made after 1959, some of them during summers spent in the Val di Rabbi.
The song speaks of deep affection without ever declaring it. The feeling stays beneath the surface, like embers under the ash.
