Director's Statement

This is a film about music, pleasure, and life: souls and bodies, hearts and lungs, and the amazing things they are capable of when they are permitted to do what they want.

Welcome to Libero Canto. Are you holding your breath?

Edvin Szamosi is a teacher of singing who works in Vienna and New York. The libero canto (free singing) approach was developed by his father, Lajos Szamosi, in Budapest before the Second World War. Its aesthetic arose from the ease, grace and lightness of a nearly vanished vocal tradition, a quality of singing that could be heard in concert halls and opera houses, particularly in Italy, until the late 1930's.

The libero canto "anti-technique" grows out of the insight that, as Edvin says, "your body knows better than you." In each lesson, Edvin guides the singer with great gentleness and humor along the ragged edges of an evolving musical process. The details of this extraordinary process are the heart of the film you are about to see.

I consider myself blessed to have spent a few years inhabiting the climate of perpetual revelation in which these lessons unfold. I hope that the documentary communicates to you the sense of delight with which we made it.

Andrea Simon, Director