L'INFINITAMENTE PICCOLO

Titles and lyrics

EMI Music Italy 2000

"The life of St. Francis of Assise is the one of a man that becomes saint, a real saint: exemplary and exceptional. Decidedly Christian in his choice to live fully the gospel, he doesn't stop for as much being a man.
St. François is a man (and therefore a saint) making the choice of the joie de vivre, he recommends it to his
disciples, he likes poverty "ever detached of joy." What fascinates me in St. Francis, it is the solar being, his vital energy that makes that he is so distant of the gloomy and excited faces of the traditional monastic spirituality.
That’s why I feel that his character, fragile and extraordinarily vigorous, is more than ever living within the passions and problems of today: poverty, illness, marginalization, ecology, behavior facing "the other", war.
St. Francis of Assise is, today more than ever, a saint but also a great poet.
He liked to sing and didn't deprive himself of it, even only.
To come with his Hymn of the Creatures, St. Francis composed a music today disappeared ; I have tried to give back voice to his words so that we can sing them again. Such is the reason that pushed me to put in music passages of his writings and the episodes of his life drawn from the Franciscan sources. It is a fact: St. François was a poet, he liked to sing and he was a saint."

Angelo Branduardi