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the
Portuguese fado. And with this high example of folk-metropolitan music, its most legendary
interpreter: Amália Rodrigues.
At the
beginning of her extraordinary artistic adventure, in the early Fifites, she was deemed by
purists to be outside of the fado tradition: maybe because of her avantgarde whims which
sounded like an offense, for those who conceived of fado as a style for only voice and
twelve string guitar. And now, compared to her young colleagues, she almost seems a
classical monument of fado.
As
regards the album, it is a splendid anthology of the songs from 1952 to 1970: such as the
famous "Lisboa antiga" and "Com que voz", "Uma casa
portuguesa" and "Maldição". A splendid album, to be listened to
attentively, and which behind a veneer of sadness - sometimes apparent, sometimes more
than real - hides a range of feelings, passions and moods which is absolutely
extraordinary. And which confirms largely what theorists of fado have always been
claiming: its being a universal, almost primitive, medium for the deepest sides of the
human soul.
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