A studious and profound connoisseur of fado and its countless stories and endless myths, Helder Moutinho sings with the clairvoyance of someone who knows the right weight of each word, filling the emotion and images hidden behind each verse with light. A discreet fado singer and often at the service of other careers, as a manager and agent, Moutinho is a fado singer who puts himself at the service of fado – while not using fado, which is quite different –, and it is this relationship that you can hear in the immense elegance of his voice, making each song an instant classic. He only adds to his spaced discography after the compositions prove that they are up to the mark, this is a performer who sings only when fado requires him to do so and who, on each such occasion, convinces us that it is a privilege to be able to witness those moments. Whilst he does not release the successor to Manual do Coração (2016), he shares with Imaterial the point where his fado is, which, over the years, has become more refined and essential.

The spontaneous meeting of this Cante Alentejano group took place in the old Taberna do Alhinho (later Galeria do Desassossego), in Beja. That first time, while socializing at the birthday of one of their daughters, it was around a table that, as befits the Cante, they joined their voices in a number of tunes. And right there they realized that that meeting had been too good to last just one night. Rehearsed by maestro Francisco Torrão, who had spent 40 years at the head of the Grupo Coral e Etnográfico da Casa do Povo de Serpa, they say they want to create their own style of singing, combining the different ways of singing from the right and left banks of the Guadiana. Its appearance, in 2014, was so brilliant that, shortly after, they were already touring stages across the country, and also taking the Alentejo to Seville or Budapest. On stage, on the street or in the tavern, they defend the Cante as it was passed on to them by their parents and grandparents. But to which they add their own experiences, imprinting it on their lives.

Parvathy Baul’s master, the singer and guru Sri Sanatan Das Baul, clearly pointed to what he believed to be his disciple’s greatest purpose: to establish a connection between the ancestral world of the Baul masters and the modern world. His instructions for fulfilling this mission were simple: take notes, file, and teach. Thus, learning from her Baul ancestors, a group of mystical musicians from the Bengal region, it is up to Parvathy Baul to spread the songs of this repertoire, allowing them to find new audiences and to deposit the Baul teachings within each listener. And it’s easy to see how the singer spreads this music, which is partly a spiritual practice, by listening to the way her voice snakes through the notes of the ektara, the chordophone she plays to accompany her singing. We may not know the meaning of each of her words, but we are taken by her voice to a place of transcendence that is impossible to refuse.

Image: © Akira Yo

The meeting between the British singer Annie Ebrel and the Italian bassist Riccardo Del Fra took place in 1996 and, shortly afterwards, this incomparable musical union would be immortalized in the album Voulouz Loar – Velluto di Luna, awarded the Diapason d’Or in 1999. Ebrel had recorded her first two albums (an a cappella record and a collaboration with the Dibenn group), while Del Fra was based in France and approached the traditional music of Brittany after a decade playing with Chet Baker. Voulouz Loar would gain the aura of an instant classic by returning to a simplicity in which the essence of Breton music was presented in a stripped-down form contrary to the electrified and orchestrated adventures that then plagued it. Instead of these modernizations, Ebrel sang touchingly helpless gwerzioù (laments in Breton) and d’airs de danse, while Del Fra dripped weeping notes from the double bass around him. The recent reissue of the album now takes us to the rediscovery of a delicate and intoxicating world.

The concerts by ANNIE EBREL & RICCARDO DEL FRA and BARRUT are organized under the Temporada Portugal-França 2022

                

Patron Committee for Temporada Portugal-França 2022

                                        

Until the release, in 2017, of the album At Least Wave Your Handkerchief at Me, saze was a musical genre that had barely travelled beyond the borders of Albania. In fact, it had to travelled in the luggage of those who left the country after the 1997 economic collapse, but above all as a thread that connected these migrants to the deepest memories of their origin. Everything changed when producer Joe Boyd (who worked with Pink Floyd or Nick Drake), intrigued by a rudimentary recording which had arrived at the Giirokastër Folklore Festival, decided to leave for Albania in search of the sounds that had mesmerised him and added the enchanting voices of Donika Pecallari, Adrianna Thanou and Robert Tralo to the instruments that help to shape these “Albanian blues”. They were the protagonists of the album that spread the saze spell around the world, based on a repertoire that, according to the description of Songlines magazine, has an “otherworldly, mysterious, melancholy and haunting” effect.

Image: © Andrea Goertler

Discreet singer-songwriter, Amélia Muge is one of the greatest treasures of Portuguese popular music, effortlessly bringing her roots and traditions into the contemporary, in a path that makes her the closest follower of José Afonso, José Mário Branco and Fausto. Writer of fados sung by Ana Moura, Camané or Mísia, it is in her own work – enhanced by the valuable collaboration of António José Martins – that she travels between the sounds absorbed in her Mozambican childhood, the depths of the Portuguese regions and the electronic experimentalism that we know from Laurie Anderson. Her latest album, Amélias, released 30 years after her recording debut and soon hailed as a masterpiece of Portuguese music, conveys in the title the many dimensions of her music. To Expresso, giving an impressive image of just how much fits into her songs, Amélia Muge described the album as being “between the Neanderthal song and HAL 9000 from 2001 Space Odyssey”.

The history of music is ripe in late discoveries, putting us before sudden wonders unleashed by men and women who, having arrived in the world with an extraordinary gift, spend decades in the shadows. Until the day when a collective awakening tries to compensate for the years in which we haven’t heard, for example, the voice of Natch Eugénio Costa Santos. Born in São Tomé but taken to Cape Verde at the age of six months, Natch is one of those voices that seems to exist outside of time, made of a sweetness that floods “his” mornas from a life spent on the streets of Mindelo. Vocalist of the group Kings, in the 80s, and for some time singing in exchange for the coins of those who passed through that roofless corner, Natch has a deep understanding of morna and coladeira, the genres that Cesária Évora spread across the planet. And it’s the meeting between his personal story and his inexhaustible understanding of local music that comes out of each syllable she sings to us. As if Natch and the morna were one.

Barrut are seven singers and a percussionist who find the source for their magnetic and wild songs in the vocal polyphonies of the French region of Occitânia – the same territory from which, in the first edition of Imaterial, San Salvador arrived. The collective enebriated state to which they lead their audience is called “a thread stretched across the abyss”. A thread that crosses, of course, with breath stolen by the amazing harmonies of these voices that unite and part, they balanced just enough so that no fall is possible. Melodically irresistible, they carry the Mediterranean in the powerful rhythms in which each song is hooked, creating a unique sound environment, like a popular song that can be said to translate the surrounding social environment and nature at every moment. With their own poetry and believing that their music must emerge from a shared creative process, Barrut invade our senses without asking for permission.

Image: © Emma Gardeur

The concerts by ANNIE EBREL & RICCARDO DEL FRA and BARRUT are organized under the Temporada Portugal-França 2022

                

Patron Committee for Temporada Portugal-França 2022

                                        

Maria Madalena (Lia) wanted the island where she was born, Itamaracá, to always be with her on stage. That’s why she chose Lia de Itamaracá as her artistic name, putting up a flag in this territory on the north coast of Pernambuco. But her music is anything but an island. Although she is known as the “Queen of Ciranda”, her songs are a place of crossing and mixing, imbued with traditional rhythms such as coco, maracatu, frevo, maxixe and, of course, ciranda. Between her own compositions and MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) classics, the septuagenarian Lia de Itamará is a vehicle of the spirit of ciranda – a dance in which people join hands and form a large circle, promoting a sense of collective celebration. It is this same sense of celebration and sharing that this legend of Northeastern Brazilian culture puts on stage. Just as her motto of life is “sadness cannot bear those who are happy by nature”.

Born in Japan, it was in this country that Soona Park came into contact with the gayageum, a stringed instrument from the Korean tradition, similar to the Chinese guzheng or the Vietnamese dan tranh. If her initial passion was lit in a school environment linked to the Korean diaspora, in her late teens Soona Park made the decision to delve deeper into the study of the instrument, moving to North Korea for a few years, studying with various locals, before continuing to learn across the border in South Korea. Her music feeds off both the technical domain of the gayageum and her particular technique, seeking reverberation and exploring the instrument’s most lyrical characteristics. Despite the rigorous study of the musical tradition of the gayageum, Soona Park is an innovator who applies her broad vision to the musical possibilities that these strings did not even know they could offer.

By CANTARES DE ÉVORA and HELDER MOUTINHO

Limited admissions subject to room capacity

In enlightened cases, such as that of Haïg Sarikouyoumdjian, the discovery of an instrument during childhood can lead to its growth becoming indistinguishable from the relationship between the two and, at times, one seems not to exist without the other. Sarikouyoumdjian discovered the duduk (oboe considered to be the soul of the Armenian people, listed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2005) at the age of ten and, since then, he began to immerse himself in such a beautiful and melancholy sound that it did not take long to enchant Jordi Savall and to be called by the Catalan maestro. The Armenian musician comes joins the Franco-Iranian Farnaz Modarresifar, one of the most virtuous players of the santur (stringed instrument of the psalter family) and whose activity as a composer will lead him to show several pieces at the Philharmonie de Paris for the first time. Over the next few months, in this unprecedented meeting, the two musicians approach different musical traditions and, above all, invent a new place of revelation and wonder.

Fundado em 1979 por Joaquim Soares e Feliciano Cupido, o Grupo de Cantares de Évora preenchia o vazio de não existir na capital alentejana até então um grupo coral que interpretasse as modas tradicionais da região. Com a particularidade de ser um colectivo misto, respeitando as memórias de infância dos fundadores, quando assistiam ao regresso dos trabalhadores das jornadas de trabalho no campo num convívio que a todos dizia respeito, o rigor e a qualidade das suas apresentações tornou-o uma das formações de referência do cante alentejano, tendo actuado para a Rainha Isabel II em 1985 e abrilhantado palcos por todo o mundo – da China ao Canadá, de Cuba ao Egipto, de Marrocos a Trindade e Tobago. Mas é na sua região que a música do Grupo de Cantares se revela maior e nos lembra o quanto cada uma destas modas soa a uma emanação directa da terra. Como se através destas mulheres e destes homens, a paisagem alentejana encontrasse forma de se manifestar.